Wise Use

A friend sent me a Nostradamus prediction that said in December at the turn of the Millennium, the Village Idiot would be elected, and just look what's come to pass! This prophecy stuff must be for real; I guess we'll have to pay more attention to these guys now.

Well, it sounds good anyway, but I don't blindly trust things that I haven't read in the original. Even if the translation's perfect, Old Nos never said which Millennium or on which calendar, did he? Forget it. There will always be a steady supply of idiots and millennia; you could tack that prophecy onto a million scenarios.

Self-appointed prophets will always moan out gloom and doom. Sometimes they take a fever dream for a higher power talking to them, sometimes they pore over Nostradamus's writings, or the National Enquirer or Freenbean's Guide to the Mayan Calendar and find some VERY SECRET KNOWLEDGE revealed only to them. Then they spruce it up for mass consumption and sell it. A few dime store prophets have even been specific about a date for the world ending. Occasionally they'll convince thousands to give up their worldly possessions to sit on a hill and watch the apocalyptic light show come at that fateful hour. But every time they have given a specific date--it's been wrong! I guess that's why most prophets purposefully keep it a little poetic and murky. Better for business.

But maybe they're onto something in spite of all that. Giving up worldly possessions isn't such a bad idea--especially if we're talking about giving up all the extraneous consumer stuff like we have here in America. As we move into this new Millennium, as we move past 6 billion, 8, then 10 billion and more people on this planet, guess what? Worldly possessions are going to get scarce and like it or not, we'll have to give some up. So much for the great American Dream.

Our consumer culture is all one-direction thinking, an exercise in expedient, greedy, single-use selfishness. An everyday example: buying Energizers and Duracells for a couple hours use, only to throw them away by the ton. It's easy because they're cheap. Is it too much to ask folks to buy a charger? To think multiple use? The throwaway culture is unworkable in the long run, but it's got incredible inertia and our wasteful habits will be tough to break.

The Dream needs to be bent into a circle. Often it's just a minor inconvenience to do the right thing. Once I bought a big roll of garbage bags, only to find they wouldn't open at the top. No big deal, the end weld was a little off the proper mark. A few extra seconds to slice it with scissors would fix--damn it kids, why aren't the scissors in the drawer where they're supposed to be? I said, a FEW EXTRA SECONDS, thank you, and they were open! I'm sure lots of people would have taken the whole roll back to the store and gotten a new one, but it was about five pounds of plastic and I knew they'd send it straight to a landfill. It still ended up in a landfill of course, but at least this way it wasn't TEN pounds of garbage bags to do the same job. I know that doesn't sound like much, but it's tons of little things like that that add up to mountains of dross that we hide in our garbage dumps.

I don't like to throw things away that might have more use. I recycle a lot of paper, cans and bottles every week, but the bigger stuff isn't so easy and it makes me kind of a packrat. For example I have shelves full of semi-broken electronic equipment stashed in my garage. The failure of one tiny diode on a printed circuit board can make a whole appliance useless, so I have collected things like a microwave, an old Mac SE30, a mixer with a fried power supply and a couple old cassette decks and car radios. It's a shame that it's too expensive to repair them, but sometimes I can cannibalize spare parts. There's also lots of copper, aluminum and iron in these things, but we tend to throw things like this away simply because it's in the wrong shape. We live in an age where it costs less to make more new stuff than to repair the old.

It's because energy is cheap. Yes, it is, even though it doesn't seem so right now, does it? Gas prices have gone up a lot in the past year and lately there's the threat of rolling power blackouts in California, (What will happen to our precious Internet Economy without POWER?) but it's still too cheap to make us convert to solar anytime soon. That's too bad. It'd be nice to pass some laws to make conversion go faster but with the incoming Republican Administration and economic pressure refusing to heed any will but its own, it's a tide nearly impossible to swim against.

It's strange to say this, but here's one thing I will agree with Dubya and Dick on: Arctic Circle Oil--go ahead and drill for it, take it now. I'm serious and I have several convoluted reasons why. Number one on the list is that whatever damage we can do to the very precious tundra up there won't amount to much. Really. I love the environment as much as anyone, but that's the truth. (Tree Huggers can send their righteously indignant letters to me using the email address at the bottom of this article, but only if they read the rest of this first.) Sooner or later our billions-strong humanity is going to suck all the oil out of the ground anyway. If we keep oil companies off the tundra lands now we will only be asking them to wait until we are DESPERATE for it. Do you think there will be any consideration for the tundra then? NO. At least now we might force them to obey environmental protection laws. We might have the minimum impact possible instead of leaving a lot of ugly structures and festering pollution behind after the oil is depleted. Anyway, once the oil is gone, no one but naturalists and a few stray Inuits will ever have any reason to go to such an inhospitable place again. Given enough time the Earth will heal in both scenarios, but it will heal faster if we do it right. Bottom line--Go ahead and take the oil. The sooner oil is too expensive to burn, the sooner we will move to solar.

There is such a thing as "wise use" of resources. Too many environmentalists think it's a code word for raping resources for profit, and they may be right in a lot of cases, but things like forests can be renewable resources if managed properly. When the oil runs out, we are going to have to grow lots of different materials one way or another, population pressure will ensure that. And if global warming does make the oceans rise a hundred feet or so, the pressure will be worse. Ultimately the key to sustainable life on this planet is cutting back on population growth.

We're definitely going to have to re-think the American Dream. The two big idiots who ran for President ran last year--everything they said was based on the assumption that the good times would roll on forever. I'm starting to think a new Depression would do everyone good, make everyone understand how fragile the good times are. It might be healthy to get a little humility back in this grab-all-you can world.

Maybe I shouldn't wish for that. After all, I predicted higher gas prices in a column about two years ago and here they are! Maybe I have the gift of prophecy too and now we WILL have a New Depression! But no, that prediction about gas was easy. Putting on my pointy prognosticator hat I can foresee a time when most of the population is living on the oceans, farming the sea far from land, in deep water, where the ocean has little life of its own. Millions, maybe billions will live in huge floating cities one day, cities that are more like icebergs, mostly below the water, getting power from arrays of floating solar panels, and filtering the seawater itself for building materials. And when will this Aquarium vision happen? When the Moon lands on the seventh house and Jupiter collides with Mars.

At least that's what it sounded like the spirit voices were saying. Or was it that oldies station playing the Cowsills again? Anyway, it's time for me to go back into the Closet so I can wrestle the recycling out to the street for pickup. We have a 17" monitor box that we use for recyclable stuff; we're only four people and it's amazing how it fills up each week. It's heavy but it's got to be done.

Oh, and I do have a last general prediction with no expiration date. Sooner or later our descendants will recycle what we've tossed, so garbage dump mining will become a growth business. Thank you for reading all these recycled thoughts and until next month, the Closet is closed.

(C) 2001 - Rusty Pipes

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Disclaimer: Rusty's comments... you know, they're... we'll, they're his own and, well I've got to get out of here now because the Reverend Puhl Kue Fat foretold that the world was going to end... right about... well right about... now.

Okay, now I feel silly. But Rusty's comments are still his own and not necessarily the opinions of really stupid people who are trying to destroy the planet or the publisher and editors of Cosmik Debris Magazine. Thank you.