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Here, Trojans, have a horse. It’s free, a gift, and you’re gonna love it.
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, a passionate young environmentalist with my name undertook a kamikaze campaign for the state senate, running as an independent. I had previously labored in Republican vineyards, and had got to know a prominent campaign consultant of that persuasion, who called me one day, having heard of my Quixotic quest.
“Tom,” he said in an avuncular tone (although we were not related), “you could do okay with this, but not by talking about pollution and sewage and agricultural chemicals, like you’re doing. Dealing with that stuff kills jobs, and people know it. You could get a lot farther talking about things that people like and that don’t hurt them, like recycling, and saving the rainforest.”
When an enemy of your cause offers free advice on how to win an election, especially in an avuncular tone, think Trojan Horse, and remember the Trojan skeptic who warned against Greeks bearing gifts.
A generation has passed. People born during that campaign are running for Congress now. They grew up with coloring books about recycling and Saturday morning cartoons about saving the rainforest. They were often told they were expected to save the world. So after all this time, all this energetic campaigning, all this forbearance by the industrial right, how goes recycling, and how stands the rainforest?
Recycling in the United States is a mess. It’s sort of like the weather — everybody talks about it but nobody does it. Only about a third of all waste is made available for recycling, and that is as good as it’s ever been. Moreover, even the people who do attempt to recycle, to be frank about it, suck at it. Sorting machinery is constantly being foiled by plastic in the cardboard, food waste in the plastic, glass in the paper, and so on.
Recycling is, of course, not an environmental practice but an industry, one that enables wasteful production and consumption on the grounds that since the resources are being recovered and reused, there’s no need to feel guilty. But the failure to sort has become so bad that China has shut down its massive imports of US recyclables — it was recently running at 1500 shipping containers per day — because they are so badly contaminated. That, and because the remanufacture of cheap crap for the American market is a severely afflicted business as well.
This massive setback for industrial recycling comes after years of decline because cheap oil and natural gas make it far cheaper to makes plastic and aluminum gewgaws from virgin material than to screw around with recycled garbage. Industries and local governments helped make recycling an ethical requirement for full citizenship, back when recycling briefly was turning a profit for them. Now, much of the stuff we think is being recycled is being dumped in landfills with yesterday’s pizza, and we have yet another demonstration of the fact that if it’s industrial it is not sustainable.
As for the rain forests, American industry is fine with saving them largely because we don’t have any in America (except, technically, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which is part of a temperate rain forest). For at least 30 years, it has been both satisfying and safe for teachers, politicians and cartoon characters to plead with us Americans to save forests that exist almost exclusively in other peoples’ countries. There are TV shows and comic books and public service ads paid for by industry and songs and I don’t know what all. About what other people should do.
So it should not surprise anyone that destruction of rainforests for their lumber, for cattle pastures, for palm-oil plantations and development, has increased every year. Now the pace of destruction is at least 31,000 square miles a year. One of the primary reasons for saving the rainforests is that they used to absorb carbon, mitigating the effects of the pollution driving global climate change. Not any more. According to a recent study the forests are so degraded they now are an additional source of polluting carbon. In fact, all together the rainforests now release more carbon into the air than all the traffic in the United States.
When the citizens of Troy accepted the gift of the Trojan Horse, they were destroyed from within. When we accepted the benevolence of the industrialists and bought into 30 years of empty rhetoric about recycling and saving other peoples’ forests, ditto.
There’s no reason that goodness can’t triumph over evil, as long as the angels are more
organized than the Mafia.
We could have saved the world but we were too damned cheap.
(Kurt Vonnegut)
Not cheap, greedy!
‘If it’s industrial,it’s not sustainable’ Yes. If it’s a civilisation,it’s not sustainable either;industrialism just ensured that this civilisation would collapse more quickly,by increasing the number of fundamental systemic flaws.
The reason the entire environmental movement came to nothing is really very simple: until you change the way money works, you change nothing. After all, if you cut down by half the amount of pollution generated by cars but then proceed to double the number of cars on the road, you go back to square one.
But the (bloody) Masters of the Universe (and I’m not referring here to that Filmation cartoon series from the 1980s) kept lying to us that we do not have to change the way money works — that Malthus and M King Hubbert and The Limits to Growth were all hogwash — and most of us believed their irresponsible lies. Hence our current predicament.
I hope there’ll be a place in Dante’s Inferno specially reserved for those… [come up with your own expletive to apply to them].
I am going to go out and plant seeds in my Garden and make believe that I am doing a sustainable thing and that I am not part of this industrial human made mess though I know I am lying to my self but am going to go with that anyway . Once again I thank you for this blog and all of you who participate by sharing your thoughts.
But planting in your own garden IS a sustainable thing, as is recycling waste into (for example) compost for your garden. If youhave a forect, by all means save it. Nothing inherently wrong with these practices until they have been industrialized.
I hear you, Michael & Tom. We do what we can, in whatever small measure, if only to keep our sanity. People talk, talk, talk these issues but do little, if anything, to change personally. In the face of the enormity of the financial and industrial machine, it seems like we can only hope to strengthen our very local community, family and neighborhood. Will that make a difference in the end, who knows but at least it is some measure of resistance.
Strong families and communities on fertile ground — it is exactly this and only this that will surely make a difference in the end. The fact that the difference will be for those families, and not the vast, corrupt machine, does not make it any less powerful. IMHO
Every calorie of food grown in your garden displaces 10 calories of fossil fuel energy that would have gone into producing that same food. There are leverage points in the system that can be put to good use. My family and I garden as well, and aside from organically grown, fresh, nutrient dense food, it improves our health physically, mentally and spiritually. That’s something priceless that nourishes us in a way the industrial system never could.
We’re all trapped in an unsustainable industrial system; any effort, however small, to lessen our reliance on it should be celebrated!
I have long been of the opinion that what needs to go into the city land fills is more and more of the source of the pollution nightmare: Meat Puppets!
It seems so bloody obvious, yet not a single tapeworm politician or unCivil Servant dotgov employee has mentioned this as the only practical, lasting solution to prevent planet earth from becoming a dead zone!
Probably hoped that by changing your message, you would draw votes from the Democrat candidate. Your instincts are top notch along with your writing. Thanks for taking the time. Yes I have become somewhat cynical over the years.
Plastic recycling is a con. Here in Seattle, we feel virtuous for engaging in this green-washing exercise. As you said, cheap “virgin” plastic means it’s not profitable to used recycled plastic. Now that China no longer wants our dirty plastic containers, we will likely end up burying them in an expensive local landfill. Instead, we should ban plastic packaging altogether. For starters, we could return to reused (not crushed and recycled) glass bottles for all beverages.
In 1984 when I was young (and gullible) I was idealistic enough to run as a candidate for the still relatively new and unspoilt Green Party in a local election here in Germany. Soon though, there began a debate within the party between factions that were quickly dubbed (by the mainstream media) ´´Realos´´ and ´´Fundis´´. ´´Realos´´ stood for realists, ´´Fundis´´ stood for fundamentalists. Propaganda at its best ( or worst). Guess who supported which position in the debate about recycling (which should properly be named downcyling since one can almost never get the same material quality the original had, especially in the case of plastic) vs. reducing and reusing things, small scale renewables vs. gigantic wind turbines and solar farms, small scale organic farming vs. huge ´organic´ corporations, caring for your own environment vs. other people´s and so on, and who got the support of the mainstream media ?
That´s right, and for me it was the reason to distance myself from that party (I never had been a proper member) and watch in horror what was becoming of the environmental movement (I agree with much of what Paul Kingsnorth has to say here:
http://paulkingsnorth.net/2010/04/30/confessions-of-a-recovering-environmentalist/ ).
greetings
Frank from Germany
Not to be picky but:
Discover Olympic’s Diverse Wilderness
With its incredible range of precipitation and elevation, diversity is the hallmark of Olympic National Park. Encompassing nearly a million acres, the park protects a vast wilderness, thousands of years of human history, and several distinctly different ecosystems, including glacier-capped mountains, old-growth temperate rain forests, and over 70 miles of wild coastline. Come explore!
https://www.nps.gov/olym/index.htm
We have a rain forest in there.
Mr. Lewis – I stayed up WAY too late last night reading your book, “Tribulation.” As we would say when I was in the book biz, a very good read. Lew
Thank you. You’re a good reader….