McKibben covers waste from many corners, but then, he covers the waste of our two wars and military waste.
"Want to talk about government waste?" said McKibben. "We're going to end up spending north of a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, which will go down as one of the larger wastes of money-and lives-in our history. But we spend more than half a trillion a year on the military anyway, more than the next 10 nations combined. That almost defines profligacy.
"We landed on a continent with topsoil more than a foot thick across its vast interior, so the fact that we immediately started to waste it with inefficient plowing hardly mattered. We inherited an atmosphere that could buffer our emissions for the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution.
"But our margin is gone. We're out of cash, we're out of atmosphere, we're out of luck. The current economic carnage is what happens when you waste-when the CEO of Merrill Lynch thinks he needs a $35,000 commode, when the CEO of Tyco thinks it would be fun to spend a million dollars on his wife's birthday party, complete with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David peeing vodka. The melted Arctic ice cap is what you get when everyone in America thinks he requires the kind of vehicle that might make sense for a forest ranger."
McKibben makes sense! He's brilliant! So why am I pulling my hair out by the roots? Why do I ride my bicycle along highways with an endless stream of trash? Why do I see fast food, beer and pop bottles littering America's rivers and lakes? Why do humans create and inject ever more deadly chemicals into the environment annually? How can Americans remain mind-numbingly apathetic to mountains of debris covering North America?
How about the ones of us that care? Let's create incentive laws to encourage the ones that don't care-to pick up after themselves. How about a 10 cent national deposit/return law like Michigan's. I have bicycled the entire 'mitt' of Michigan and never picked up one plastic, can or bottle container. Why? Because no matter who tosses their container litter, an armada of kids picks up everything for the financial reward. It's time for America to take responsibility for cleaning up America. Let's stop the waste stream by engaging a "National Recycling Policy".
The original people of this continent, living here thousands of years, maintained a pristine environment. New arrivals from Europe trashed North America inside of 150 years. That's unreasonable and immoral. It's unconscionable! Let's change ourselves toward a more responsible society.
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