Welcome fellow inhabitants of Earth. I've recently returned from a year long hiatus from reality (chosen location of hiatus = Scotland) to find myself smack dab back in a world full of pressing matters, ever-increasing natural disasters and increasingly consuming self interests. It's not all bad though. Positive change has been happening since I left too. People are, I believe, starting to gain an awareness of how day-to-day activities and the basics tenets upon which we carry on with life are having a global impact. Hope remains alive.

I have taken the advice of a very inspiring friend and mentor, Rob Paterson, to create a 'passion' blog in addition to my personal blog. The result is Earth to Shannon, which will be a forum for discussion about any and all topics relating to the environment - from global topics such as climate change to topics closer to home such as whether GMO foods will be banned on Prince Edward Island.

My hope is that by posting on this blog I will find myself actively engaged in a learning process that will help me better understand the complexity of the environmental issues/concerns that exist and perhaps give me a heads up as to how I can actively participate in change for the better. I'm also hoping that this blog will be more interactive and invite everyone to make comments and/or introduce new topics to the discussion.

For this first post, I invite you to take a look at this site http://www.myfootprint.org/ to calculate your personal footprint on the world.

I find it intersting that the largest footprints on the world are created by the most 'advanced' nations, as we have the wealth to consume more meats, take long-haul flights, drive autombiles, etc. At the same time, the greatest devastation from our lifestyles has not been, until very recently, evident in our own backyards. Most of the environmental degradation is taking place in third world countries, particularly in Asia, where corporations take advantage of cheap labour and non-existent environamental laws to bring us products at bargain prices. So the garbage remains far, far away.

Ahh, but climate change is starting to catch up with us and there appears no way to keep that from entering our backyards. The number of destructive floods, hurricanes, mudslides, heat waves, etc over the past few years seems unprecedented. Whether these climate changes are due to human activity that has taken place overhte last century still seems to be up for debate, but with the glaciers melting and the ozone layer depleting it seems hard to continue denying that our existence is interfering with Mother Nature's maintenance of our hom, Earth.