El Niño was the first time that I had really become aware of Mother Nature’s presence. Though what it is exactly, I couldn’t tell you.

In recent years, however, it seems that Mother Nature’s cries for attention can no longer be ignored: Ice storm of ’98, Indonesia’s tsunami of 2004, the rapidly melting polar ice cap, Hurricane Katrina, and closer to home, Toronto’s snow storm of 2007 that just happened over the weekend, and which Toronto is still digging itself out of.

Global warming seems to be screaming at us to wake up and pay attention. It certainly seems to have caught the attention of global political leaders who attended the recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on the Kyoto Protocol in Nairobi, Kenya. It has also received mass media attention thanks to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth“.

The environment, climate change, and the effects of global warming are all things that I confess to have a limited understanding of. Despite this, however, I do understand that we, as individuals, are affected by the environment in which we live.

There is no choice involved as to how you would like your environment to affect you, or whether you want to be affected only by a certain part of the environment and not another. The environment is far bigger than we sometimes like to think.

Often times we forget that our immediate environment does not constitute the environment as a whole. Surely what doesn’t affect us won’t affect anyone else?

How naive and and almost selfish we are…

The personal responsibility and power that we use to achieve so much in our personal lives can also be used to achieve much in the global world. I am constantly awed by the fact that the effects of our capacity to take care of ourselves (or lack thereof) is not limited to our immediate surroundings.

It is not enough that we hear about global warming in the media and wait for global leaders to implement laws and protocols which are intended to reduce greenhouse gases and hopefully slow down the effects of global warming.

Why wait to be told what to do when we are perfectly capable of initiating change ourselves?