[Eco] Recycling and P&T's Bullshit

[John W. Cooper]

On Jan 30, 2007, at 19:42, Daniel Brashler wrote:

> I think people's love of recycling does grow out of environmental 
> movement of the 70's and 80's, during which the big push was to prove 
> to the nation that "pollution" (a word you hardly hear any more)[...]

I hadn't thought of that. I really *don't* hear that word as much as I 
did in the 70's and 80's.

I still see and hear pollution all around me though. I find trash in 
the forest near my house, and the streams are not clean; I can see 
soapy, oily films in the water, mostly coming from street runoff at the 
peripheries of the forest.

Compared to the 70's, I'd say (from my limited personal viewpoint) 
there's less air pollution, more water pollution, less trash, more 
noise, and less wildlife.

> Ultimately, all our efforts at recycling are tiny in comparison to the 
> one on-going juggernaut event that is the growth of human 
> civilization.

I'm with ya there. Human population growth is something that is totally 
out of my control. My contributions to it happen to be as low as I can 
manage (i.e. zero), but I can't fight billions of people following 
billions of years of genetic cunning. It's troubling to me (I'm sure 
most people my age are not troubled by this at all) that there are 
twice as many people in the world now as there were when I was a child. 
My only hope now is that there is twice as much brain power to confront 
problems that have exponents in them. Maybe the computers will help us. 
In the meantime, I think reducing, reusing, and recycling helps a 
little.

:-j