Unless you are a total Bushie or have spent the past couple of years selling oil in Saudi Arabia, you understand that the world is using up our natural resources at a breakneck pace and turning our once pristine earth into a giant toxic waste dump.

We have to change and we should be thinking like we need to change.

We cannot keep shipping our garbage to eastern Washington or Oregon - even the Hawaiians on Oahu are getting ready to ship their garbage in ships bound for the Columbia River and thence to eastern Oregon.

Oil is spiraling toward $150 a barrel and OPEC is refusing to pump more so the price, abetted by greedy speculators, will go up and up and up.

China is pushing to get from the Third World to the first and now Beijing has traffic that makes Los Angeles seem like a dream.

It used to be smog that bothered us, and it still is some places. But watching television views of polar bears trapped on thin, quickly melting sheets of ice in the Arctic Ocean and larger and larger chunks of glaciers crashing into the sea around Greenland makes us aware that we are despoiling our world and we better get our house in order.

Even George W. Bush is catching on, but not so much that he won't keep giving and giving to his oil company pals.

In Seattle, all of this has spawned the King of Green, our own Mayor Greg Nickels. He has been spotted adding a bit to global warming by jet setting around North America - not just the United States - signing up mayors and state officials to his Go Green campaign. He has been successful and for that he should be praised. He is doing what our president refused for too long to even consider. We recognized Nickel's hard push when we found his face and a story about him a while back in Canada's Toronto Star newspaper.

But have we gone too green? Have we gone from one extreme to the other without stopping to think, to study and to figure out the consequences of what appears immediately to be a good thing to do for Mother Earth? Are we creating, unwittingly, some really bad problems in the wake of trying to quickly clean up our act?

No, we are not suggesting we should go back to our own wasteful ways, but in a city where process often takes what seems like centuries, we seem to be moving at almost breakneck speed.

Oh, sometimes it is simply something more annoying than serious, like the mayor's proposal to tax paper and plastic bags to bag a bunch of money to use to spend on telling us how bad using these bags are. Some of the normal slower City Council members leapt onto the bandwagon. We editorialized it was a dumb idea, and we still think it is.

More serious are the light bulbs that use less power but must be handled like hazardous waste.

But, those are just examples of local silliness.

A hugely serious matter is pushing the use of corn, canola and soy into fuels. Anyone who has spent any time in Africa knows this is a horrible idea. We need to find other ways to power our world, but do we need to do it by snatching the maize out of mouths?

Government needs to think and plan and consider before simply doing because it sounds like a good idea. We, as a society, complain that sometimes drugs are put on the market before being fully tested and studied. We should not do the same with our move to green.

Let's keep searching and studying so that sustainable is really sustainable and not an even worse curse.

Slowing down is only bad if it is accompanied by burying a head into the sand.

- Jack Mayne