Thomas Kostigen, an environmentalist and best-selling author, imparted some frightening statistics during a Town Hall-south lecture Feb. 2 in the auditorium of the Upper St. Clair High School.

"How do we wake people up?" Kostigen asked the audience.

Big business and governments around the world need to become more involved in preserving the world. But if done collectively, it's the little things that add up.

"It's time to take responsibility for what we do," he said.

Jerusalem, where, he said, 50 percent of the world's religions converge, has many of its historical sites covered with wooden scaffold because of the deterioration.

Change must occur.

"It's not only to preserve for the future, but to preserve the past," Kostigen said.

In Alaska, pollution is so bad that as the ice melts, entire villages have been lost to the sea. Where once solid ice met the shore, waves now crash. Polar bears are drowning as their habitat disappears. When Kostigen visited a small Alaskan town, two village elders drowned when they fell through thin ice.

He said he determined that if someone turns on a light switch, polar bears drown. A little far fetched, but somehow, true.

Dark pollution, such as soot, is attracted to the white areas of the globe. Hence, much of Antarctica and the Arctic are white, and black pollutants fall from the wind patterns onto the pristine snow. Dark absorbs heat and melts the snow. The dark pollutants are produced from numerous sources, but one is the coal puffed out of coal-powered electric plants. More demand for electricity produces more dark impurities that travel to the Arctic and polar bears die, Kostigen said.

Trash is also becoming more of a problem. Two places can be seen with the naked eye from space, Kostigen said: the Great Wall in China and the now- closed Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, N.Y.

Electronic waste is out of control. Eighty percent of the waste, such as computers and cell phones, are shipped overseas where their destruction is often unregulated. To recycle a typical electronic device in the United States costs $20. But shipping it overseas provides the waste hauler with a profit of $15, so that's a net gain of $35 per device.

Overseas, primarily in Nigeria, India and China, the computer or whatever, is ripped apart, usually without regard to the safety of the worker, and the parts are used to produce new products that are then shipped back to the U.S. filled with heavy metals and other pollutants.

Vegetable oil is contained in toothpaste and it comes from palm oil mainly harvested from trees in Borneo. Land is burned to provide planting space for the palms and the orangutan is losing the habitat.

Buy in bulk to eliminate packaging. Don't purchase water in plastic bottles, don't let the car idle, don't water the lawn, turn off the lights, buy local products and eat more vegetables than meat as cattle need more water than plants to grow. Don't throw food away, compost.

The best way to start saving the world is to stop wasting.