Earth Day
I’m not sure we’re doing Earth Day right.
Lots of us went out over the weekend or are going out today to pick up trash on the side of the road or in public parks. It feels good for people to see the bags of trash they collected and the roadsides do look nicer without trash all over.
But is it really useful? The same people who’ve been throwing fast food wrappers, plastic containers, tires, and furniture on the side of the road are just going to work tomorrow and the coming year to maintain trash entropy.
I have to admit we’ve done one thing right in banning plastic bags at the grocery store. It used to be I could go out to pick up trash along the road by our property, grab a bag right out of the ditch and start filling it. Now I have to bring a bag with me to put the Mt Dew bottles (in my experience Mt Dew is the favored drink of litterers, along with airplane size bottles of vodka), and MacDonalds wrappers. But the combined waste hardly touches the sort of waste of wars in places like Ukraine and Gaza.
Don’t get me wrong, war is bad anywhere and there is no difference in value of one life or another, but in terms of physical destruction and waste of resources which affect the natural systems of our planet destruction of multi story concrete apartment blocks, whole cities with roads, water, and electrical infrastructure, is on another level above wars in poorer countries that live more lightly on the planet in terms of the resources invested and the eventual need to replace all that stuff that was perfectly good before a bomb dropped on it. It’s even more horrific to see existing public resources like hospitals destroyed compounding the human suffering along with the physical waste.
Images of hundreds of oils wells on fire during one or the other of the Gulf Wars are seared into my brain, tons and tons of carbon flooding the atmosphere for nothing, no usefulness ever came of that, and for what?
To my way of thinking it’s better to leave the trash on the side of the road, to just admit we are a filthy society, but work on changing our collective foreign policy to demand diplomatic end to conflict where possible and strong defensive pacts such as NATO to prevent future conflict.