Earth Day ruminations, part 1

Filed under: Collapsables, Typecast — Oliver April 23, 2008 @ 12:07 pm

4 Comments »

  1. ‘Atta boy, Olivander. I think my own personal carbon footprint is pretty tiny, but mostly by accident, a simple matter of circumstance. I’m just a poor white guy, trying to raise a family. I don’t like to drive ginormous vehicles because of a disastrous event in my youth involving a Chevy Impala Land Barge and an attempt at parallel parking. I’m paranoid about chemicals, about electronic transmissions, radio waves, magnetic fields and all invisible weakers of aural havoc. I live on a good-sized lot in rural Ohio, and think dandelions are pretty but annoying only inasmuch as my son is allergic to them.

    I’m not quite confident enough to discuss my own personal political ideology on teh interwebs, especially when a huge number of my online friends have loudly expressed their own views which, for some unknowable reason, are almost invariably very different from mine, and some of these online friends have written extensive diatribes against my own personal political ideology, and have done so in a way that’s not just strident, but truly hateful, a fact which I’m just too darned generous to hold them to, and it makes me less likely to come out of the political closet due to all the likely awkwardness that would ensue.

    Putting aside all the grandstanding on either side of ecological issues, I think the bottom line is we all like to live and play and swim in places that are clean, and that none of us really likes to be told what to do.

    Comment by duffymoon — April 23, 2008 @ 12:33 pm

  2. I’ve tried to minimize my impact as well, but living in a place where there’s no city recycling program makes it hard not to just throw away everything. So far I’ve settled for the compromise of throwing away plastic, glass and metal and feeling guilty about it. I’d like to do better. So far I’ve just tried to not use too much.

    My wife and I are expecting our first child and she has made it clear that we will use disposable diapers. Since I will be sharing diaper duty with her, I have made no objection to that.

    Comment by CStanford — April 23, 2008 @ 4:20 pm

  3. Otherwise known as strikethru, having some weird log in problems with that user name… ack

    Let me speak out (briefly) in defense of cloth diapers, although I’ll back up a little and say, per your post, I also did a ‘green sweep’ a year or so ago and changed a lot of habits (canvas shopping bags was my favorite change I made. What an easy thing to do, and no more big old plastic tumbleweeds of bags around the house). I researched the cloth diaper thing, wanting to give it a try, and went with ‘pocket diapers’ which actually were not gross or hard to clean (actually ultimately smelled better than the diaper genie thing). They are costly though. I still use them part time (they are too much of a hassle with day care) and I’d say it was worth doing and not as gross as advertised. Although I might advise, wait until the kid hits the solid food phase, but for any non parents here, I have already gone too far, so I will just shut up now.

    Comment by cheryl — April 24, 2008 @ 12:26 am

  4. Sorry about the login problems. I hate that I’ve even had to implement comment registration and moderation. You should see how this place gets assaulted by the spambots, though. Even with registration, it still gets hammered.

    I have to say, diapers are the one realm where I willingly supplicate to convenience over the environment. I had no freakin’ idea how hard it is to care for an infant! I will gladly trash the planet for anything that makes the job even a teensy bit easier.

    We’re fortunate to live in a community with a pretty good recycling program. What garbage can be burned goes into a waste-to-energy incinerator at the power plant, and they’ll take your yard waste and convert it to a giant pile of compost. Plastics recycling is lacking. The city has a contract with a company that turns plastics into carpets. The problem is, they only use #1 & #2 plastics, so the city won’t accept all of the other types, which make up about 75% of my plastic waste. So I throw all the rest in the bin, too. I figure maybe if we flood them with enough #5, 6, 7, & 12 plastics, they’ll get the hint and find another company that buys them.

    Comment by Oliver — April 24, 2008 @ 2:30 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.