Green stuff.

'Cause I'm green.

“’Cause I'm green” says the chorus from Kermit the Frog (the Muppet) in his cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”.

Honestly, I think that is one of the few things that I know about “Green Stuff”.  But what’s the problem with the real “Green Stuff”? Everybody has heard about increasing pollution, accumulated trash, and all kind of “stuff”, and the idea about teaching environmental topics in schools is only a recent activity. Nowadays, people learn about the troubles of excessive pollution by social networks, films and TV series, but apart from feeling sorry about the world and the poor children of the future that will suffer our mistakes, we do nothing more meaningful.

Personally, I'm one of those people that don’t do anything to try to make a cleaner environment, but some weeks ago I had a strange experience in the supermarket, where while I was carrying the bags to the car, the guy that was packing the bags next to the cash register brought probably 200 plastic bags and kept packing. Although it was something normal in every supermarket worker’s day, for me it was a little bit shocking. How many trees had to be turned down for packing a single bottle in a single bag?

These thoughts would sound as false modesty, but I think that after thinking all day about the plastic bags, I (think I) changed my mind about Green Stuff, and started to change my daily routines in order to improve a little bit my environmental consciousness, starting obviously to use less plastic bags, stop using my dad’s car excessively on weekends, trying to walk more and to recycle paper in the supermarket next to my house.

Although the minimal carbon footprint that every person in Santiago might have by making a more “environmental life” would be probably less than the 0.1% that an international industry would contaminate in one single day, environmental knowledge must be increased not arguing that if we don’t change our minds, our planet will be destroyed, but thinking that our life quality doesn't depend only on economical stuff. It depends also on our relationship with nature and how dangerous this relationship could be  for us and for the planet.