While sitting in my Medical Microbiology class the other day viewing PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide of horrible, incurable diseases of the genitalia, I couldn’t help but daydream back to a time when modern medicines and technologies were the stuff of science fiction novels. Back to a time when Sir Alexander Fleming was quickly becoming every college student’s best friend with his discovery of penicillin.

As a college student and almost-scientist, I see every day how human innovation has bettered millions—nay, billions—of lives. How the automobile and plane have shrunk the world, how the internet has put knowledge at our fingertips, and how a simple antibiotic prescription the day after a night enveloped in Jungle Juice and black-out sex can save an individual from a lifetime of misery.

But is it possible for human innovation to be hurting us?

Before I entered my sophomore year of college, our university required that every incoming student read the book titled Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben. McKibben essentially presented a Dooms Day message about how our technologies were going to… well… kill us all. I remember thinking that technological advancement has helped all of us in countless ways, but is our progress killing us?

The answer is extremely clear: maybe.

It’s obvious that human innovation and industrial progress have elevated peoples’ quality of life to a level that was unknown to generations prior. But with these improvements have come detriments in the form of pollution, poisoned water supplies, mountainous landfills, and a knack for wasteful consumption. Societal advancements come at a price. The Industrial and Technological Revolutions of the last two centuries brought with them a smorgasbord of new environmental challenges.

The same innovations that have worked to harm our environment must be utilized to save it.

It is a Green Innovation—a Green Revolution, if you will—that must occur and continue to swell and spread throughout the hearts and minds of those at the forefront of human innovation. It is only with a mindset geared towards placing environmental protectionism first and human comfort second that we can begin to halt the effects that mankind’s genius has inflicted on our planet. Each presidential candidate is espousing how he will put environmental issues at the top of his agenda. Great. But real environmental change will only occur when the individual, not the government, decides to step up and tackle the issues at hand.

Step up. Everything, and I mean everything, is riding on it.

Today I have to go back into my Med Micro class and suffer through two more hours of horrible images. God bless antibiotics.

Message of the day: Wash your hands kids.

-Daniel

Tags: environment, genitalia, green, revolution, technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 3:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.