If it's sexy, they will come

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was once quoted as saying that if being environmentally friendly was going to be successful, one had to make it "sexy" and attractive in order for the general population to pick up on it. And he's right, of course. Our hunger for more things and status and bling and the comments like oh-my-God-where-did-you-get-that will only be satiated when Mercedes makes their vehicles hybrids and Calvin Klein uses green energy to produce and deliver everything straight off the runway. Without using carbon credits, Mr. Al Gore, you silly man.

But the real point is that you have to make lots of things sexy for them to become mainstream. You say I can make my own web page, populate it with all things me, and people will come admire it?! MySpace and Facebook, welcome! You mean I can post videos of myself and earn instant viral fame?! YouTube/GodTube/YouPorn, my savior! (Yes, YouPorn really does exist. Yikes.) You mean I can actually learn to be grammatically correct and feel like I'm rubbing elbows with the stars at the same time?! It really does exist!!

My sister-in-law was recently voted by some friends on Facebook to Most Likely Correct One's Grammar, and both of us know where to stick our apostrophes. It seems there is a small movement to get Americans to care about their dangling participles and remember when to use to/two/too. See also Truss, Lynne: Eats, Shoots and Leaves; Grammar Girl; Grammar, Dr.; Grammar Aquarium, The; Grammar Blast; Grammar Bytes; Go Fug Yourself (Lohan, Lindsey). It probably seems ridiculous, but they're out there. No matter what, there is still that tiny movement of people who are silently correcting your storefront windows that say "Come Get You're Free Sample Today!" and loathing the fact that your "apostrophe's" are given possession when they only deserve a bit of plural healing. Let's face it, America has turned into a bunch of grammar slobs, and not to mention the fact that no one has yet made dieting and exercise sexy enough for us to become at least less fat than our First World country counterparts. We like vice. We like torture. We like cheating and guns and big scary vehicles with loud, rumbling, sexy engines. The movies give it all to us; you don't see Mr. and Mrs. Smith driving Prius hybrids as a getaway car, do you?

So, does this kind of "sexation" of the uncool appeal to our deepest, darkest selfish needs? Of course. We all just want to fit in, and being part of the so-called Grammar Police is only a term of admiration from others who just want to forget the sentence diagramming they did for an entire year in 8th grade. But don't worry. Once some of us admit that being green really is sexy and cool, we'll be sitting in the heart of America with the coasts coming closer than ever, bumming cigarettes and smoking them as though we're being watched through a lens, reminiscing about the good ol' days when LA use to shine brighter than the sun. Because that was the cool thing to do.

Allow me to clean that up for you

These kinds of people are why my generation, and Rachel's generation, have to pick up the slack and "save the planet" from imminent warming dangers.

Neighbors in Atlanta are arguing over a man's right granted by the county to erect a 45-ft. high wind turbine on his property, at the price of $15,000, in order to curb his dependence on fossil fuels. Angry detractors have placed signs such as "Trees: Yes, Towers: No" in front of Curt Mann's property, blaming zoning officials for siding with Mann and damaging the historic preservation of the neighborhood, which boasts nearly century-old homes and trees.

I love history in its principle. It is the only reason any of us has made it to this moment in time, and although I find it deadly dull to study, there is something to be said for listening to a grandmother talk about the way things were decades ago, or researching how technology has evolved over the years. It teaches us our mistakes and we use it like a compass, pointing us in the right direction when we can't find our way through new terrain.

But. BUT. It is frustrating when humans fall victim to the folly of wishing for no change, for resisting against forces that require us to keep up, forces that sometimes we pushed into motion but now are unable to stop or even slow down. I do not care for people who cry when their neighborhood landscape is marred by a man's attempt at using nature's other resources to make a better future for his kids, and to adapt to the inevitable: that the fuel our Earth has fed us will run out. That the globe is warming at an alarming rate, perhaps faster than it should be, even if we were on the natural evolution for a warming planet. Watching the polar bears suffer from ice melting. Watching our oceans rise, perhaps threatening coastal cities (New Orleans is too obvious: New York City! San Francisco!) and permanently altering the Earth landscape.

Some argue that Earth is on its natural warming trend, that it goes through cycles of hot and cold, and we're just witnesses to a phenomenon that will happen no matter what. But this is supposed to take hundreds of years. We're measuring changes over the last 50 years - a sliver of time, a mere millisecond in the Earth's lifetime.

And you people are worried about your Victorian houses. A shame. I like me a good Victorian house, for sure, but modern times are everywhere. Why not admire the beauty of the mix of the historical and the modern in one landscape? Why not be thankful for the piece of history that you own, and yet realize that it was the very thing that helped your neighbor point himself in the right direction for what is so desperately needed? When Ford rolled his first car off the assembly line, no one had any clue that the thing spewed toxic gases and would eventually force today's car companies to wonder what we have built our lives around?

All I know is that, when my daughter is my age, what will the landscape look like? Will New Orleans be destroyed for good by then? Will San Francisco and Oakland be half-washed into the ocean because of an earthquake that shook the ocean with a record-sized tsunami? Will New York be a wading pool? The lives of coastal peoples all around the world could be, well, not. Look at Indonesia and the Indian Ocean earthquake that spawned the tsunami that destroyed the lives of thousands. In two decades, what will my daughter's generation have to think of? And will they have the luxury of arguing over their Victorian-era houses' livelihood then?

I think my generation's actions now will prove the answer for that question. I can only hope we point them in the right direction.