Blue Dot
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
It's Not Working!!!
May 5, 2007
I became aware of our environmental plight far back when I was in fourth grade. In those days, there was a huge environmental campaign aimed at stopping top soil degradation. That might seem trivial today, but that was just the beginning for me. Since then I've been media bombed by so many environmental plights that I've become a master at tuning it all out.
I remember sitting in class listening to a lecture given by an environmental speaker the school had brought in. He lectured us on the importance of top soil, how it was being depleted, and what we could do to prevent the annihilation of our precious top soil. I think 90% of us went home terrified! No top soil no food...OH MY GOD!!!!! LMAO!
Jump forward a few million years and I think that to have been the most idiotic campaign of all times. Only to be surpassed by the superiorly stupid "paper or plastic" environmental campaign! After all, smaller landfills are worth having as long as we destroy precious forests to use MORE paper!!! Right? Wrong!
The top soil rhetoric (bull crap) was replaced by the paper or plastic push. The Paper or Plastic campaign was so successful in penetrating the psyche of the American consumer that people would confront those selecting plastic bags at supermarket checkouts to tell them the reasons why they should opt for the paper bag. Now that, my dear, is effective mind blinding marketing. Even fast food restaurants became victims of the paper or plastic campaign. Poor things were forced, and sometimes boycotted, into changing their synthetic food packaging for paper.
So paper did away with plastic. Our landfills got smaller and so did our forests. Where do you think all that paper comes from? The paper fairy? How stupid and blind can you people be to chose paper over plastic? Think for a second! What would you rather have:
a) A lush tropical forest untouched by man.
b) A smaller landfill.
c) A forest that has been rapped for the sake of making more paper.
Not all paper comes from recycled sources. In fact, you can only recycle news papers and last time I checked, not many of us read those! Besides, we will always have landfills and they will always be huge because we buy crap and throw away crap to make room for more crap. Just look at all the people throwing away perfectly good TVs to replace them with plasma and LCD screens...all the people throwing away perfectly good appliances just so that they can replace them with stainless steel or black appliances for the sake of decorating. Where's the environmental sensitivity in that? How much room is all that taking in our landfills? Where do you think all those bulky appliances go? It's not just appliances, it's everything we buy and throw away.
Stop being such idiots for once and think!
Which brings me to recent events at my office. There's this little group of well meaning yet impressionable "greens", as we affectionately call them. Their idea of saving the environment is to get everyone plastic recycling bins and have them recycle paper. They were fuming when the office manager bought Styrofoam plates and plastic utensils because the kitchen's china wasn't being washed. They were pushing to break the bank by forcing the office manager to purchase recycled copy paper, at about $50 a box to replace the $25 a box regular paper. The greens didn't stop there, they were going to print pamphlets and hand them out to everyone in the office to inform them about the importance of recycling and saving the environment.
I almost pissed myself laughing until I found out who was pushing for all this. The poor thing, she was a few years fresh out of high school and swore she knew it all. When I realized that she was inherently stupid compassion kicked in. I killed her green's movement within days.
I am not against saving the environment. I am, however, against stupid inefficient ideas for saving the environment. The green's ideas have not worked. Just look at the state of the environment and how our planet's resources have continued to decline.
The greens' idea of getting everyone recycling bins is not only ineffective but also 100% illegal. Why is it inefficient? Because the resources required to institute a recycling program in our building would overshadow the benefits of recycling office paper. Office paper cannot be recycled since no processing plant in our area will accept it. Also, manufacturing the plastic bins and spending the funds to get one for every employee would be astronomical against any benefits to the environment. How about the amended Privacy Act of 1988? That makes recycling (throwing away intact documents) illegal! Those print outs not only contain private corporate information but also confidential customer account information. It's a treasure trove for crooks and illegal to throw it away in a legible manner. But silly greens never thought of any of that.
My solution: Instead of throwing away the paper, turn the darn thing over and use the other side for printing internal crap that customers will never see. Bitch slap the idiots who print and file their e-mails. Kill the culture of paper by forcing everyone to scan and stop filing crap that will never be seen until purged into the shredding bin. Files, after all are made of paper...paper comes from forests!
Recycled paper is such a cute idea. But you know what? I'd rather spend the extra money and donate it to a charity that will go out and plant a tree. There's such a huge price difference that it makes absolutely no sense to buy recycled office paper. Besides, I am pretty sure that recycling paper pollutes just as much as manufacturing new paper and uses just as much energy.
My solution: Donate the extra money to an environmental charity that actually goes out and does something about the environment. Even better: buy energy efficient light bulbs with the cash savings and hand them out to employees to replace incandescent and energy hungry light bulbs in their homes. Not only would employees be grateful but you would make a huge impact in carbon emissions as hundreds of homes use less and less electricity. But, since the greens have never seen such thinking in their cuttie environmental literature they couldn't bring themselves to cope with what must have seamed a mind blowing idea.
Buying Styrofoam plates and plastic utensils almost got our office manager killed. One of the greens almost tore her head off when she saw the boxes of plastic forks and plastic knives. Poor stupid silly green. Has anyone ever given any thought to the energy required to wash a plate, a cup, and a set of utensils? Has anyone ever counted the gallons of water that are used and polluted by detergents to wash what you used to cook and serve yourself dinner? Even if you used a dish washer...how much carbon was emitted into the atmosphere to make the electricity that powers your dish washer? What would you rather have, smaller landfills or more greenhouse gases and polluted lakes with water that you can no longer drink?
