Thanksgivng Discussion

This assignment was hard for me. Growing up among educated parents in the liberal city of San Francisco, it was hard to find much resistance about the growing need to find better solutions to the environment. With so much of California industries and culture is centered around the forests of Northern California as well as the huge agricultural areas of the Central Valley, keeping the environment healthy is a concert on everyone’s mind. If anything that was discussed around the thanksgiving dinner table was the fact that many in my family might take a too extreme approach to dealing with the environment. My sister runs a non profit in Portland Oregon that works to restore the Columbia river so she is real rabid about the need to fix the environment. My father, a small business owner is always weary about new laws and taxes that will hurt his businesses.
There was much discussion about the future of the environment and what seemed to be the overall theme was that any future changes need to be pragmatic and not too destructive to the local economy. Among these new solutions can be the practical tools such as new energy efficient light bulbs that do a lot to conserve energy. Because of many in my family feeling taxes and other environmental regulation already puts a large burden on business, conservation of energy seems like a much more practical solution then radical approaches. Small changes such as insulated windows and better mass transportation.
There was optimism for the future and that the fear of massive global warming and rising of the oceans was nothing but fear mongering. There was no doubt a belief that more is needed to be done, but the key was to make it manageable and not draconian top down decisions.