In the immortal words of Kermit the Frog, “It’s not easy being green.”  What he meant to say was, “It’s not easy being green when the rules for ‘being truly green’ keep changing.”

Over the past 40 years or so, dedicated environmentalists have changed the world.  They are not through by any stretch, and they have done a great service for all of us.   Because of their efforts, the rivers and lakes and the skies above us are cleaner by far; all of us have become more conscious of our responsibilities to keep them that way.

We at Charlie’s Soap have done our small part. Textile plants near us in Southside Virginia and the North Carolina Piedmont reduce the strain on waste water treatment plants by using our new, more eco-friendly detergents. Through our small efforts, and with the efforts of many others, water in our Mayo River, once colorfully polluted with dyeing and finishing wastes, has become cleaner and cleaner.  We have also installed expensive dust collectors and recyclers in our own laundry powder operation to help keep the air clean.

With every year, more environmental science majors compete to improve our air and water, but it is getting harder and harder and more expensive to discover and eliminate the last, tiny remnants left by decades of carelessness.  All the easy pickins’ of pollution in the world’s responsible and free societies are long gone.

Just what are all our thousands of poor environmental science majors going to do?   Some have found ways to properly use their hard-earned knowledge and continue the good fight.  Others, however, justify their keep by scaring enough people into believing we are all going to die unless some new terror is not immediately attended to.  They offer to help folks — for a fee — to comply with new, stricter regulations imposed to combat the latest contrived terror.  Shamans and witch doctors, in primitive societies, have been doing this for eons.

I love my clean air and my clean water.  Our source of water at Charlie’s Soap is the aforementioned Mayo River.  It still needs to be treated before we get it, but the river itself, thanks to honest and diligent environmentalists, is pure enough to drink without any treatment at all.  That says a lot.  However, I’m very happy that good rules in place require its treatment all the same.

What a wonderful world we have made so far, and we still have lots of work to do.  Let us not ever lose sight of our responsibilities — even though some of the current popular terrors will surely turn out to be nothing more than scams.

Let us all be diligent and make sure we seek truth and not follow the latest fad that only pads the pockets of our would-be witch doctors.

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