:: KipperCat :: =^. .^=

:: Monday, June 02, 2003 ::

:: posted by John ::

WARNING!!! Tree-Hugger Alert!!!

Remember. You have been warned. I am a self-confessed tree-hugger. I have become convinced that no finite resource can be handled with reckless abandon without consequences. It would be tempting to aim this at our current administration, since the popular press has made so much out of President Bush’s environmental policies and actions. Tempting, but not useful. Mr. Bush is no more the cause of the problems we have and/or soon will have. If anything, he is at least honest in his lassie faire attitude toward environmental issues. That will no more protect him than me from consequences that we are currently experiencing and can expect in the future; but I admire honesty where ever I encounter it.

More than one person has observed that we are a very wasteful culture. I am not competent to judge if this is a product of two centuries of enjoying abundance of natural resources or a recent by-product of a consumer economy that promotes throw away material and products designed to last no longer than the next market season or the next model innovation whichever comes first. My own introduction to this was when my Church started a recycling program to raise money. We started recycling newspapers for cash. It take a lot of news print to make much at $.12 @ hundred weight and even more when the price drops to $.005 @ hundred weight as it did during the first eighteen months of the program. By that time we had raised over $5000. Not much for the effort; that is what the administrative council of the church said when we reviewed the program. Never mind that that was twice the amount needed for the project we had taken on and it had not come from a single parishioner’s pocket book. I had become fascinated by our ability to raise money painlessly. In fact, I found out as I started looking into the situation that we were actually doing a lot more than raising money. One direct by-product was that the paper was made back into paper for use again at a cheaper cost to the manufacturer. A second and harder to quantify was the impact of keeping all that paper out of the landfill. Landfills cost money, tax money from my pocket book. So, the longer one is viable, the less often the city, county or other local governmental entity has to secure the land for a newer one. And the newer one always cost more because the price of land trends upward. By this time we were averaging fifteen thousand pound of paper a week; I cannot tell you how much volume that would represent, but it was a sizable amount anyway you looked at it (approx. 780,000 pounds a year and the program has been in place for ten years = 7,800,000 pounds of newsprint that did not add its volume to the land fill.). Not a bad record for a medium size church in an urban neighborhood.

About the same time, I started vegetable gardening. Early on I discovered that nursery’s wanted to sell me every kind of fertilizer I could imagine to improve my garden. A little study revealed that my garbage can and yard had most everything I needed for my own fertilizer… the raw material for compost. I started making my own compost (adding some free horse manure to the mix of vegetable leaving and grass clippings) and not only improved the soil in my garden, but better yet it did not cost me any out of pocket money! [Trust me – this is all going to lead back to “today”]

By now, I was well on my way to becoming a full fledged tree-hugger (I prefer tree hugger to environmentalist because I happen to like trees!). That was when I started becoming conscious of how very negative the majority of our society regards “environmentalist”. I was a little puzzled by this, since many of the same people were also sportsmen, fisherman, hunters and the like who you would feel would have the same respect for the world around them that I was developing. Digging deeper, the root cause was that old “Devil” politics. Both of the major political parties have platform statements embracing respect for the environment and a public policy need to protect it. But, party line broke down what should have been an area of bi-partisanship. After all, we all breath the same air, drink the same water and need food to continue to live; so protecting these things is no more than self-interest.

Not so in the political area of the U.S. Both sides have consciously and unconsciously moved the two parties apart on environmental issues. An excellent, recent, congressional battle is illustrative of the situation; the fight over the opening of the Alaska wilderness area to oil and gas exploration. The Democrats opposed the opening on environmental grounds, nice. The Republicans supported it on our continuing need for more energy and the need for more domestic energy sources. As the debates went on it became a “Big Business” vs. “the little guy” with any meaningful debate rapidly lost by the wayside. In the end, the vote went straight down party lines with little more than finger pointing on both sides of the aisle left to read about. Lost in the debates were comments from the major players in the energy business (Exxon/Mobile & Texaco to name two). The major energy exploration and development companies were busy pointing out that it would take ten to twenty years to develop anything that might be under the tundra and that they really were not too interested in dropping several billion dollars into a “maybe” area when there were other (mostly foreign) areas that show greater promise for less investment expense.

After nearly twenty years of “Earth Days”, even the classification ‘environmentalist’ has acquired a negative image in the majority of the populace. And, my fellow tree-huggers have helped the negative image along by their tactics and association with other political sub-groups that do not sit comfortably with the main stream of the country. Too often, the efforts of the politically active environmentalist are public demonstrations against oil companies, or the International Monetary Fund, and many similar fellow (political) travelers. The appeal is made to the populace ‘conscience’ to “do the right thing”. Sadly, doing the right thing only happens when it doesn’t hit John & Mary Public in their pocketbook or life-style. Too much time has been wasted appealing to the public’s conscience. Just isn’t going to work; Abolitionist spent over fifty years appealing to the public to eliminate slavery with the same sort of results. A large portion of the population (in the Northern states) agreed that it was a good idea and that was about that. The matter was resolved at the expense of many lives and a legacy of “separation” that still haunts American politics dividing along north/south lines. A better appeal is to demonstrate the advantages of recycling and renewable energy. While I have concerns over such issues as global warming, air and water quality and exhaustion of finite resources, I have learned that I am very much in the minority. I make more progress when I stress the benefits that are not always so obvious. Recycling plastic, glass and paper has the potential for multiple benefits that are difficult to quantify. The first is the simple fact that by keeping these materials out of land fills, the land fills last longer and fewer tax dollars are required for the acquisition of land to fill a growing need. The cost of converting glass & plastic back into useable forms is less than the creation of the same from raw materials; again there are or should be long term cost savings if implemented on a broad scale. Renewable energy is harder. Solar power is still not able to compete price wise with the petro-chemical energy that predominates our society. Wind power is becoming effective, but is “location centered” in its utility. The only “practical” advantage towards moving our energy usage to renewable sources is in the realm of foreign policy and international relations. Successfully weaning ourselves away from oil, gas & coal based energy frees us from reliance on overseas sources.

Exxon/Mobile recently postulated that they did not see more than one percent of the U.S. energy coming from renewable sources by 2020; and so were not interested in investing in such areas since there would be little or no return on the money in doing so. Far be it from me to question the corporate wisdom of one of the world’s more successful entities. I will try, however, to persuade; to look beyond this year and even beyond 2020. Back to those difficult to quantify benefits of re-directing our economy and energy needs to more renewable and sustainable sources. One fringe benefit would be cleaner air; transforming hydrocarbons into usable energy produces byproducts that stay in the atmosphere for long periods of time. You and I breath that air and it gets into our systems. If that gives you now pause, then consider looking at a bridge or underpass that is more than five years old. If it has not been sand-blasted inside of that time period, black deposits streak the sides and undersides of the structure; and you and I get to breath that twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. I am no doctor, but I suspect that it has the potential for long term health issues.

For now, I would only ask two things. Try to separate “enviromental” issues from the speakers; consider what is being discussed on its own merits and proceed from there. And, finally, try to think beyond today in your thinking. Nature has a way of biting us when we least expect it.

:: -- John 6/02/2003 08:57:00 PM [+] ::
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