Saving the Planet - One poor decision at a time.

Well not really. So, each day when I wake up to go to my job I am faced with the dilemma that I would imagine is a metaphor for our greater struggle as a people to maintain our environment.

I'll state up front that I am all for "saving the planet" as long as Al Gore and/or the American government are not in charge (or any where within 500 miles) of the efforts surrounding this and no one is allowed to collect a "carbon-footprint" tax from me just to pump into a green ETF which is comprised 95% of companies that have energy solutions incapable of economically sustaining themselves without massive government stipends and/or tax breaks and is one republican senate away from looking like a bank stock after the media poo-poos Paulson's recovery plan. (Good thing I just day trade, investing is for suckers On a side note: Mike Smith - Diversify.)

In addition - to quote the late George Carlin, "We're not saving the planet. The planet isn't going anywhere, it's the people that are fucked."

So please save any spiritual, earth-child bullshit for someone else. I am only (very loosely) behind this cause because I don't want my children to inherit a brown sky, expensive bottled water and gas masks. I'll save my utter disdain for nuevo "earth therapists", carbon guilt donations and other assorted riff raff and con artistry for another post.

Moving on - As I was saying I am faced with a large psychological dilemma that is perhaps the exact microcosm of the nation's environmental macrocosm. Each morning there are two bags organized on my porch. One bag contains "garbage" and the other bag contains "recyclables". I'm not quite sure how these bags come into existence, nor how they end up on the porch. I know only that at some point during a "chores" discussion (during which I was playing Xbox360) it was dictated to me by a higher authority (my wife) that it was my destiny and duty as "man" to bring these bags downstairs and to put them into their corresponding dumpsters.

Seems simple, but alas like anything you have ever said "two weeks" to as a technology estimate - you are very wrong, the devil is in the details and you should be prepared to work many, many late nights to hit the "two week" estimate you didn't want to give in the first place but your sales team needed a "ball park" estimate which was later promised to the customer. And quite a devil he is. Beelzebub I would say if I were to name him. Maybe Mephistopheles, I haven't slightest idea really but certainly "a" devil.

You see, in my apartment complex there are two dumpsters. Well...3 really but two "dumpster areas" of which one "area" contains two dumpsters and the other contains but one. The "area" with the single dumpster is very, very close to my apartment. I can reach this first dumpster by simply trotting downstairs, taking a few steps into the street and tossing the bag over the the little brown wall that separates it from me with a victorious underhand arc that is truly awe inspiring to witness.

The end of the bag flutters through the wind like a dragon's tail as it is carried through the air by the weight of the payload before crunches into dumpster with a rounded thud. I take distinct pleasure in not actually knowing if the dumpster is empty and wondering if there will be a resounding "GONG" as the bag hits the metal bottom and the sound wave carries throughout the entire parking lot. I would imagine that this makes some sleeping people in my complex fairly unhappy, but my inner child doesn't care and let's face it, he's running the show these days.

The other 2 dumpsters can only be reached by navigating all the way around the first area. All in all this probably equates to about 60 steps, maybe 30 seconds of my total morning time. I realize that probably doesn't *seem* like much to you and you're probably scoffing at my lazy indecision but there is a little known and undiscovered element of modern physics that dictates that at 5am - groggy and tired as I am - time itself slows down like bullets in the matrix making this little 30 second walk appear to me as the mother-fucking Appalachian trail.

In the winter.

During Bear mating season.

And while those two things (winter + bear mating) probably don't correspond in nature (because bears hibernate you see) I'm sure you get my drift.

Okay - so getting past my flowery descriptions of arcing garbage bag trajectories - The BIG problem here is that the second area contains....you guessed it...the recycling bin. My "area" has only a lowly garbage bin. While there is plenty of room for a second recycling bin in the first area, it appears that god has seen fit to test my resolve as man by manipulating time, space and conscious so that a recycling bin in area 1 is no where to be found.

As a result each morning I am faced with the following choice:

1) Throw the recycling into the main garbage. Damn the world to a brown, wasted, globally warm existence of burning carbon fuels, Fallout like mutants and republican government. Get on my bike and zip off to work.


---OR---

2) Do the right thing, brave the Appalachian trail, take an extra 30 seconds and put the glass and plastic where they belong thus creating a better, greener world filled with new, and completely unobjective, economically unsustainable, products we don't as a people need so that we can feel better about having done our part to reduce our carbon footprint.

I won't say it's not a struggle. I won't say that I have never stopped mid stride and stared into the not too distant "second area" of bins and strongly considered saying "fuck this world and the next" and tossing my bag of beer bottles (mostly Chimay Blue - which is lovely) and orange juice containers into the main bin and guffawing into the ether, "IT IS NOT MY FAULT! THE SYSTEM SHOULD ACCOUNT FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME!". But, while I think it, I do not do it.

Well...(said guilt) that's not to say I have *never* done it but there was extenuating circumstances surrounding this particular lapse in judgment. There was a period where this desire was exacerbated by the fact that the majority share holder of my company told me that the city of Irvine actually had a filter center where recycled material was pulled from the regular garbage. (In retrospect: I believe this to be a fiction he told himself to alleviate his own "Green guilt", but lets let the story continue.)

For a few days I bought this, let myself believe him and tossed bottles and cans with reckless abandon into the area 1 bin until of course Sarah caught me doing so and said,

"If Irvine spends millions of dollars pulling bottles and cans from the main garbage why do they put a recycle bin out?".

Her logic was clear, clean and irrefutable. My subsequent and well expected denial followed by research into the "magical factory where hundreds of recycling fairies sift through your garbage and remove paper, glass and plastic for the betterment of mother earth" failed to surface any reliable evidence of a such a fantastic place.

Nevertheless each morning the little demon that lives in my head whispers in the cliche voice that only a demon living in your head would have, "Come on dweeb, you can toss it the close bin....just this one time (jtot, joe. Jtot). Besides - recycling guzzles more petroleum then it saves anyway."

Each morning I almost succumb....but eventually grumble and miserably walk around to the second set of bins, irritated that the 1 bin area is closer to my apartment and that recycling probably *does* use more petroleum then it saves. I'm even further irritated by the fact that I don't really (and probably will never care enough to) know this for certain but have been mentally conditioned by the "planet green" network (which my wife loves) to acquiesce to their demands and purchase overpriced green friendly cleaning products.

Right. So the moral of this story is that even if it *seems* like it's a good cause....it's just disguised consumerism and we're all (even the little demon) just lemmings being manipulated by the media.

Demon lemmings.