Saturday, July 19, 2008
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
A lot of us think of green living as conscious living – being aware of where our food, energy and products come from, how they were grown or made, where they will go and how they will be handled when their useful lives are over.
But an article in the business section of Sunday’s New York Times, about an English doctor’s crusade to get the populace of Ghana, where diarrhea and other bacteria-caused diseases are rampant, to wash their hands with soap after using the toilet, makes one wonder if teaching people to live consciously might not be less important to the long-term sustainability of the planet than simply reforming their habits.
In the case of green living, all the nagging we do about using less energy, composting, saving water, recycling, etc., has not been as successful as we’d like. Neither have the typical public health campaigns against drugs, AIDS and, in Ghana’s case, using soap to save lives. That prompted Dr. Val Curtis to take a cue from a successful soap seller – Procter & Gamble, which sells billions of dollars worth of Tide, Crest and Febreze, a product marketed to remove odors that had flopped in early ad campaigns – about changing people’s habits as well as their thinking.