Today is Blog Action Day. For 24 hours, 19,974 blogs write about one topic: the environment.

I have been watching blog after blog joining the campaign, and the more big players participated, the more sponsors were supporting it.

It seems that everyone agrees: the environment is one of the most important issues. Again. That’s right, there was a similar movement going on in the eighties, and it subsided in Green parties, Greenpeace and a few laws about whale hunting, which have been undermined and loopholed by Japan ever since.

I remember anti-nuclear energy stickers on school bags next to ACDC stickers, local WWF collections to save Pandas and schools here in Europe were spreading the belief that earth’s supplies of fossile energy would not suffice beyond the year 2007. In 1985, that seemed a long time away in the future.

Having lived in San Francisco off and on, from about 2003 until spring 2005, I learned that having anti-SUV bumper stickers on your car is fashion of the same chic like wearing an old army jacket with a pink ribbon, while you’re walking down Upper Height, demonstratively presenting your solidarity with a widely overrated and romanticized group of college dropouts with rich parents in the sixties.

I can see the same patterns reappearing today. It’s all tres chic. Of course we are all for saving the environment. Who isn’t? Since we’re all one happy family of geeks, I feel it’s safe to say we all are on top of this topic, with our RSS feed readers with 41’365 messages waiting for us.

Together with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, and while reading about his new book (which I honestly heard is good), we right-clickingly buy a symbolic bottle of water to support well drilling somewhere in Africa.

I am no better, I am no different. The question is, what could make a difference? Many say, turn off the lights. Turn off your computer. Do a walk in the park instead. While I agree that 20,000 life switches being turned off in the same moment sounds like such a pretty idea, I’m not sure if it’s really cutting it.

Let’s face it: the biggest source of trouble on earth are humans, and the biggest oil guzzling, energy demanding, pollution crating source among all humans are the United States of America. (I know China has more citizens, but guess what, they also use more bicycles.)

Among some of my friends, I am known to support quite unpopular ideas, such as removing all borders and getting rid of the concept of countries and nations. Yes, I know, it’s radically utopian and frankly sounds like a nut idea. But it wouldn’t be the first nut idea that carried further than the words proposing it.

Prepare for even more insane ideas: What if we wouldn’t have nations and borders? What if our value system was equalized and the same matter wouldn’t cost ten times the price of what it costs at another point on this planet? What if we had local governments ruling over small communities, connected in a network that is supported by global laws, not national ones? I am not thinking about the United Nations. I am talking about truly global laws to protect the environment.

Nature is a global thing, you know. It’s not a local issue or a national discussion topic. Nature has no borders and nations. That’s an invention of humans. Nature is evolution, and currently we are interrupting its natural development, disrupting it with massive shifts of elements. This is what pollution and oil consumption are all about, a shift of elements, caused by Western Civilization.

By now I might have lost a couple more readers than just the ones who were looking for gossip about Paris Hilton. But if you’re still here, do me a favor. Pardon me, it’s two favors. One, go read Al Gore’s new book. (It’s less about environmentalism and more about the troubles caused by the U.S.) Two, tell me your idea of changing the world in global context, not only as one, or a couple of nations. I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on new concepts of living together, ideas beyond our worn out models of nationalism, economic efficiency and our all too well established value-system of “you have it and we want it”.

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