In the last week I've watched the world celebrate Earth Day and Australians and New Zealanders remember ANZAC Day. In fact I wasn't just watching, I was also feeling the emotion of these two days as I reflected on their meaning.

ANZAC day is now bigger than ever in terms of engaging people's emotions and galvanising our thoughts on all the servicemen who lost their lives. At different points over the last 80 years ANZAC day had almost been forgotten in the annual calendar as people went about their lives with unconscious disassociation. Not any more. It is now seen as a sign of national patriotism to actively participate in the ceremonies of 25 April. When I was growing up I remember seeing the grainy images of Gallipoli each ANZAC day as a handful of Australians, usually direct descendants of soldiers who died there, conducted their own intimate remembrance ceremony. These days going to Gallipoli is the closest thing Australians have to the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. So many people now make the trip to Turkey every year that grandstands have been built to accommodate the crowds. People with no particular connection to the place or the armed services, but with a strong sense of national pride and desire to be part a unifying albeit solemn occasion. Ironically Gallipoli and the battle fought there is nothing more than a footnote in military history when one considers the central role played by ANZAC soldiers in defeating the Germans in France, by breaking the Hindenberg Line, and in doing so changing the course of the war. It matters not to me as Gallipoli symbolises all the battles fought, won or lost in the course of two world wars. However, observing the modern day scale and fanfare of the Gallipoli ceremonies does remind me that even the history of war can't escape the meddling self-serving influence of the media. I wonder in another 80 years whether young Australians will even know the relative significance of battle at Gallipoli or what it symbolises? Time has an uncanny way of shaping history.

Earth Day was again both educational and inspiring to me this year. I really feel I'm now an active agent of change for a better environment. I think every human needs to individually come to terms with the environmental devastation we are causing the earth. Its like religion, no one can tell you to believe, each person reaches their own enlightenment in their own time. Luckily today's children are growing up with an environmental consciousness built into their base education. Aria already knows plastic bags clog our ecosystems, cars pollute our air, that she needs to turn off the light when she leaves a room, and not to let the water run while she is brushing her teeth! So it seems we have achieved massive progress in awareness within a single generation. I think I've always been relatively alert to environmental issues from an intellectual perspective, but struggled with the practical side of things, constantly asking myself: "how can I make a real difference, I'm only one person ?". Many people share my disillusionment and feeling of helplessness. So we all persist with our daily lives allowing ourselves to be paralysed into inactivity, yet preaching the environmental mantra in some abstract way to rationale our own sense of morality. I have tried to absorb the scientific teachings over the last 10 years and in Asia I have almost constantly lived with environmental degradation surrounding me (except Japan, which is an amazing social role model, where an environmentally responsible lifestyle has become an accepted way of life). It is easy when you watch An Inconvenient Truth to be physically and emotionally disturbed, but at the same time so daunted by these realities that its easier to turn it off and pretend for just a little bit longer that it happening 'over there', somewhere else, not here in my city or on my street. For the average person the destruction of our world is not a daily thought yet. For me, its fair to say I have been building up to this environmental awakening for a while. Earth Day this year was a culmination not just because I re-learnt how incredibly dire our situation is but because for the first time I felt it is really happening.

For the last 12 months I have been rejecting plastic bags whenever I buy something, instead I just take the items into my own bag or just simply carry them unwrapped. It started out as my own little rebellion against the status quo of shops unnecessarily wrapping everything in plastic, but it then turned into a mini research assignment as I studied the responses of shopkeepers to my request for no wrapping or carry bag. I do it everywhere I go and I've become more and more assertive in my rejection of the plastic bags. I now include an environmental message to the shopkeeper as I reject the bags, hoping other customers will hear me. The looks on faces when I do this range from complete confusion and incomprehension to smiles and congratulations. My secret hope is that by rejecting plastic bags maybe one day the shop keepers I've met might decide to resist the dumb automated process of handing one out to every customer and instead ask "do you need a bag with that?". That would be progress.

I believe we are reaching a tipping point of awareness, more and more people are seeing the light every day, we have got to change the way we live. My guess is sometime in the next 10 years there will be massive social movement globally towards a new way of life. Not to say the change will happen overnight, it will still be gradual but momentum is noticeably picking up. Politics remains the greatest hurdle to overcome. 5 years ago it was politics and economics, but rapidly creative minds are finding a way to make being eco-friendly also financial viable. Now getting politicians to force big business to change is the key.

When I was a kid, "environmentalists" were considered weirdos or alternates, called tree-huggers and looked upon by 'civilised' people as no-hopers or trouble-makers who had nothing better to do with their time. Now I'm sitting here thinking to myself there is no better use for my time.