Going green is easy -- maybe too easy.

Ask yourself this question. Which is more important: human suffering or potential danger to our environment?

It's a question we all have to ask, in this time of financial crisis, when we have less money to donate to what we think are worthy causes.

Should we be sending our hard-earned money to causes that support "green" energy, or should we be supporting groups dedicated to relieving human misery in parts of the world that most of us will never visit?

Yes, we should all be cutting down, conserving, right? We should use less gas, which means driving less. Buy fewer packaged goods: cook from scratch. Recycle more of the bags we use and the newspapers we read. But we should have been doing that all along, a long time ago.

Waste not, want not. This isn't a new idea. It probably came from our parents, or their parents, survivors of The Great Depression, when every dollar and every commodity was precious. I suspect it came from their parents and grandparents, who settled this country and who used every resource they had, letting nothing go un-used.

This current crisis is nothing new, except for us. Our parents and grandparents saw it before. And they developed a very good financial strategy: Don't buy what you can't pay for.

Then came the time of easy credit, when you could put down almost nothing and buy almost anything you wanted, be it a car or a house or a snow-blower.

We were living large, way above our means, but then the crisis hit -- banks started to fail -- and we lost our jobs and our means to repay what we'd promised we'd repay. We lost our homes, too, not to mention our cars and snow-blowers.

As a result, many of us are in big trouble, having lost our jobs and maybe about to get kicked out of our houses.

At the same time, there is this constant talk about saving energy, preserving the forests, developing alternative sources of electricity -- wind, solar, even nuclear.

Whoa! Someone is putting the horse in front of the cart. Hello? We're in trouble here. Thinking about saving the environment is secondary to most of us, who are figuring out how to survive.

But things are even worse in other parts of the world, where whole populations of people in Africa and other places are being absolutely destroyed by tyrants and vigilante bands who decimate whole villages, raping and maiming and killing. I can guarantee you that saving engery is the last thing on their minds!

Should we really be so concerned about saving dollars on our utility bills when much of the world goes hungry or is attacked daily? Shouldn't our money and our star endorsements be going to help not just us who are about to lose our homes but to our fellow humans who have no homes to lose, or who have lost theirs not to banks but to thieves?

Are our lives worth more than theirs?

Imagine a woman whose husband has been murdered and who is now living in a tent with her kids, with no running water and a temperature above 100? And a guy with a gun comes to her and says he'll give her bread for her kids if she'll have sex with him? Or he doesn't ask and doesn't give her any bread but just has his way with her. Or a victim of torture who has no hospital to go to but is returned, on makeshift crutches, to his village, which doesn't exist anymore, to die alone in the ashes of what used to be his home?

And you're worried about whether solar panels on your roof might bring up the price of your house? You're proud of "going green"?

The environment is important, but I have to think that human suffering, anywhere in the world, is more important. A rising tide lifts all ships, someone once said. Lifting all the people on this earth to the same level of subsistence has to benefit us all, right? The fewer of us left in poverty, the more of us can dream of something better. The more hope we have, the less crime, the less desperation.

Global warming is a problem, for sure, but leaving most of the world's population in want and in danger is a much more immediate problem.

With all due respect to my liberal friends, we need to be sending our nation's resources to help the people of the world and worry about the environment later.



After all, the environment has been here longer than us and will be here long after we're gone. Whatever damage we do to it won't last. It will recover and go on as before, just as it does after earthquakes and fires and floods.

"No man is an island," wrote the poet John Dunne.

I think human suffering trumps the environment any day.