I’ve been a fan of hip hop for many years and have always felt that music has a powerful impact on society. The music gives people a way to escape the everyday stresses of daily life, and most people seem to respond to hip hop in some way. Maybe they move more, maybe they start having more fun, maybe they start dressing more, maybe they start talking less or stop talking altogether.
Well, hip hop has been taking a toll on the environment for a long time now. I’m talking about the effect of music on the environment. The hip-hop artists we see today are making their own clothes, growing their own food, creating their own paper and plastic, and making more waste than ever before. There’s a reason why hip hop started to take over so many different industries.
The amount of plastic we produce today is larger than every single one of us.
The average consumer is consuming 15 pounds of plastic every single year. That's a whopping 300 million tons. That's like taking a whole truck full of steel and putting it into a million individual plastic bottles. Not to mention that the amount of plastic in the oceans is so large that it is contributing to oceanic acidification as well.
There are multiple factors that contribute to this problem, but one of the underlying reasons is that the mainstream media has been so focused on the negative and demonizing the negative that we have been missing the positive. Hip hop is a part of the solution, and its popularity (and the use of its music in educational films) shows that there's a movement that is helping us to live more eco-friendly lives.
The negative has been all over the place lately. A few years ago the mainstream media tried to demonize the negative with stories such as “Plastics are killing the oceans” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, but that was a complete lie. It was just more sensationalism that was taken out of context, and so we’re seeing the positive taking center stage in the media.
In reality, there is no such thing as a true eco-friendly lifestyle.
The way people are living is a function of how people have lived for the last 30,000 years. We are making a conscious effort to follow the most important steps of ecology and environmental justice.
The term “ecology” came from the Greek word “kēlēs,” meaning “life.” So when you say “eco-friendly,” you're talking about life-affecting practices, like recycling, buying organic food, and growing your own food. It's not a matter of giving up your favorite foods and switching to a new one.
The term eco-friendly is used to describe how we live. When I say that I believe everyone should be doing their best to live in a sustainable manner, I'm referring to a lot more than just the way we eat or how we shop. It's about living in a way that helps the earth and our environment. But more than that, it's about making a conscious effort to not hurt the environment.
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