racing and the environment

I am informed that today is blog action day. Or perhaps tomorrow. Or the next day. It's the internet - nobody knows what day it is.

The topic I'm supposed to address is 'the environment'. Given my week I think I can fairly do that. We headed over to Charlotte, NC for the NASCAR race this weekend. It was quite a race, but it was also quite an event - the amount of waste and environmental hurt caused by these events is mind-boggling. Imagine 160,000 people all using disposable everything for a long weekend, driving giant motor homes in to camp, and finally, the highlight, a bonanza of burned fuel and oil. An article discussing the fuel usage question noted "NASCAR also considers its 6,000 gallon per weekend usage modest when compared to national daily consumption, which is estimated to be about 380-million gallons. [president of NASCAR's largest team, Geoff] Smith thinks sports gets a pass because of what it provides with every tank." Of course, it's easy to point fingers, rather than fix problems. Some very basic solutions might be recycling bins for all the beer cans and plastic bottles. Addressing the cars and the fans' cars might be more difficult - not one of the (many) promotional areas was for any sort of green tech - power tools and tractors carried the day. But I think I would be naive to expect them. Which is, of course, the problem.

I love the logic of "yes, we're wasting a lot of [thing] but so many OTHER people are wasting so much MORE, so that means our waste isn't NEARLY as bad." Um, how about we ALL use less?

Don't even get me started on all this. Last week at the HighEdWebDev conference that I was at, someone called me "too green" b/c I brought a coffee mug down from my room to use with the breakfast buffet (which only had disposable cups) My response: "There's no such thing as 'too green' right now." This week, I get back to work and among other things, I want to start trying to improve the recycling program.

I used to work with a guy who was proud of his waste quotient. I think there's always going to be people like that, and the only thing you can do is make sure they pay their fair share.