As a follow on to Sue Petranek’s letter to the editor (Herald, Aug. 24), we should be concerned about how we treat our local environment and we should be impressed with Durango’s collective response to our recent river crisis. We also should remember that we are all members of ecosystem Earth. And our personal choices today in Durango may be creating new environmental crises in China, or India, or Bangladesh.

The cell phone or tablet or computer on which you may be reading The Durango Herald right now required mountains to be destroyed and moved for their rare earth metals. I encourage readers to search out the city of Batou in Inner Mongolia via Google Earth. Check out the enormous toxic lake. This is the result of our demand for a new device every two years. Before you sign that new cell phone deal for a shiny new device, think about where the old phone goes and where the new device came from. Do you really need to cause that environmental impact? Is it really a deal?

We sometimes tend to get caught up in the American dream and, because the harm happens elsewhere, we don’t think there is an impact to our decisions. The gold and silver mining that caused issues with the Animas happened a while ago. But some consumer benefitted from that gold and silver – and that someone may have been unaware of the toxic situation left behind. Ignorance about our current behavior can no longer be an excuse to behave irresponsibly. In a global economy, our environmental decisions as consumers have a global impact. And as consumers, we are in the driver’s seat. We can all demand sustainably sourced content.

We love our river, and let’s work toward seeing that our local ecology is on the mend. And we should all be constantly aware of our daily choices and how we may be personally responsible for polluting another river somewhere else in the world. Living sustainably as a member of planet Earth requires a global, and local, perspective.

Holly Duckworth

Durango