Desiderata for the Environment and the Home

The delicate balancing act which we need to learn to do, requires lots of judgement.

Should we recycle everything, knowing that there will surely be a point where the recycling guys at the landfill will be tempted to throw up their hands, and simply toss everything into the trash?  This happened at least once at my place of work, and it could easily happen even in the waste-recycling centers, if supervisors just happen to relax their vigilance.

Should we urge our friends to recycle everything, to the point where they begin to avoid us?  Those who do not recycle as aggressively as we do ourselves, probably continue blissfully along, until someone reminds them that they ought to be recycling.  You can imagine that they probably hate to be reminded.

Should we be doing our laundry so frequently?  (Should I be reminding you that this is a thing, and risk having you not read my blog?)  Every load of laundry means more detergent in the sewer, and more warm (or hot) water going into the water treatment plant.  On the other hand, if we get our clothes too dirty before washing, it might take more detergent to get them clean.  I just don't know.

I recently found that there has been discovered a way of extracting Lithium from frack-water.  You probably know that Lithium is a central resource in using battery-powered equipment; hybrid cars and all sorts of wireless equipment is powered by Lithium, and Lithium-ion cells.  I don't think this technique alone will result in an increase in fracking, but it certainly makes one think.

Notice, though, that despite the value of Lithium, nobody seems to be offering us any incentive for recycling our old battery-packs, from cellphones and laptop computers.  Those puppies are worth a lot, but the Lithium jockeys out there are cannily keeping quiet, because they want these old cells and battery packs for free!  Once they begin to have to pay a dollar for each battery, or whatever, their costs will begin to skyrocket.  One imagines that it will be cheaper than extracting Lithium from frack-water.

It is important to keep a sense of humor with regard to recycling.  Of course, anyone (like us) who regards recycling a deadly serious business is not entirely wrong.  But dealing with our kids, or our spouses, or our friends, and discussing recycling alternatives requires a gentle and delicate hand.

For instance, we know that it is bad to throw waste cooking oil into the sink.  (It ends up clogging the sewers, and is a load on the water-treatment system, as far as I know.)  So in our house, we put it in bottles, and once the bottles are full, put them in the trash.  Now, that's a load on the landfills.  But which is worse?  I know friends of friends who would rather not put anything in the landfill; they would rather recycle everything.  If there is an easy way to recycle household cooking oil, we really owe it to ourselves to do it.  If there is a biodiesel collecting point in our neighborhood, someone should tell me.  We have family in Missouri who are in the biodiesel business, but what are we to do, mail them our waste oil?  (Humor, don't forget!)

The other day I told the check-out clerk at the supermarket: no bags!  No bags, please!  I was buying just a couple of items, and I could easily put them in my pockets.  But I should have done it with a smile, without scaring the heck out of the poor young lady.

Our area is just backward enough that we cannot afford a full-time recycling Czar, who would function as the official reminder to let everyone know where the recycling centers are--for instance, the Friends' Fellowship (the Quaker Meeting) used to help recycle batteries at one time, but now, though such stores as Best Buy ought to do it, they occasionally confess to customers that they just throw certain sorts of batteries right in the trash, so we may as well do it, too.  Who collects used engine oil?  Who collects used tires?  Metal?  Wood?

People thought of burning wood as a service they performed for the environment.  (If anyone cut down a tree for any reason, they would ask for the discarded wood, to use for home heating.)  No more wood rotting all around the property, and they were saving their dirty, coal-burning electric plant from generating the electricity (or the gas company from having to deliver gas, or the oil company from having to deliver heating oil) for their heating system.  But times have changed, and we want to get away from burning anything.  We desperately hope that the electric company is releasing less CO₂ per calorie than anything we can achieve at home.  (If it isn't, we can all focus our attention on the electric company and urge them to improve, which would be the biggest bang for the buck, environment-wise.  The economies of reducing pollution using electric or hybrid cars, public transportation, every sort of improvement pivotally depends on electric generation plants reducing their pollution output.  Unfortunately, these plants are occasionally managed by people less interested in these goals than almost anyone else.)

The point is, because our attitudes towards waste management are evolving so rapidly, as the years go on, our conversations with our friends about what we do, and what they could be doing, are likely to become increasingly awkward, because our practices are going to diverge rather strongly, the more the state- of-the-art keeps changing.  This is where the Desiderata poem comes into play: we need to learn to talk to people in such a way that *they don't get mad, *they aren't embarrassed, *we aren't embarrassed, and *we don't discourage future conversations.

Not least, we have to keep an eye on maintaining our own equilibrium far more aggressively, the more that ignorant other folks out there deliberately try to destroy our peace of mind, simply because the sight of us Libtards, quietly going about recycling stuff--which of course, is to their benefit as well--is so terribly repugnant to them!  It makes me smile.  (Which shows that I'm a terrible person.  Sense of humor.)

A few months ago I wrote about guys in trucks who hated to see hybrid, low-emissions cars on the road.  Some of them would roar by, blowing horrible exhaust smoke at the vehicles they so despised.  Often certain types of conservatives, and certainly Alt-Right folk who really have no ideology at all, behave in highly puerile ways, which they cannot defend with logic, but which they do try to defend in various logic-defying ways, to the embarrassment of anyone who uses logic, and subscribes to the axioms of scientifically knowledgeable people.

For more of my thoughts about Desiderata, read on.

A decade or so ago, everyone knew what was meant by Desiderata, which was the title for a piece of prose, which, over the years, has been elevated to the status of poetry.  Even if one didn't recognize the title, certainly after reading a couple of lines from it, you recognized it at once!  It had a way of attaching itself to the walls of the offices of important people, such as college Deans.  Here it is, at right.

Its very ubiquity (it's presence everywhere), often blinded me to how thoughtful it was.  My guess is that it was written by a pastor at some Lutheran parish--it would be interesting to find out for certain--and was so admired that it presently found itself being framed and put up on walls.

Unfortunately, to our generation and the ones immediately following, the word placidly sort of ruins the mood of the entire piece.  But the word simply means peacefully and calmly.  That first paragraph says: try your best to remain calm, and keep peaceful relations with everybody without abandoning your principles.  Let's agree to disagree, is what it suggests.

The second paragraph amplifies the first: make your statement calmly, but be prepared to listen to the other side.  Even the dull and ignorant have their story; which suggests that any opinions people have with which we differ, could have their roots in our unique personal histories.

Paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 are quite self-explanatory, and I may wish to editorialize on them at a later date.

Paragraph 7 means: don't be afraid to change your mind, if your experience tells you that you were wrong.  Stubbornly clinging to a youthful principle is foolish.

Paragraph 8 tells us to prepare for bad times.  But don't mess up your mind by dwelling on the possibility of disaster.  This is particularly relevant to today.

Paragraph 9 is profoundly comforting.  You are a child of the universe; you have a right to be here.  You don't have a right to continue to destroy the environment, but those who think Mankind is a scourge on the face of the planet are not entirely right, says this paragraph.  A lot of authors of science fiction tend to think of humanity as a pestilence on the planet.  This is not a helpful attitude.  Yes, we have destroyed our environment, but at the time we were doing it, we did not realize the scope of the destruction, and it was a necessary phase in our engineering development, which ultimately enabled us to put satellites into orbit, and so on.  It's just that it appears impossible to reverse some of these destructive situations without making some businessmen rich.

"With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world!"  This paragraph says more about the optimism of Mr. Ehrmann, the author, than he probably realized.  (Or realizes, if he is still alive.)  We should all be so fortunate as to look out of our eyes, and see a beautiful world, rather than a world that's blighted beyond repair.

The conditions out there are rapidly deteriorating, we have to admit.  But we are a species, among countless other species, and we brought great disruption on the balance of nature on the planet of our birth, greater disruption than most other species.  But our relationship with the environment was an essential part of our evolution.  Perhaps we will destroy our planet.  But there was no guarantee that we, as a species, would last forever.  If we manage to head off destruction at the last minute, we will never again be able to live the decadent lifestyle we have enjoyed in the last several decades; we will have to live frugal, fearful lives, always mindful of the needs of our fellow-species, just as we should have lived all these years.  Perhaps those science deniers know, in their hearts, that environmental apocalypse is on its way, but they would rather blow it all, and have a ball, as they used to say.

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