Song: Handlebars

by Flobots

Quotable: Look About You

"And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children."

- Khalil Gibran

(Thanks, Kelz!)

Waste Not, . . .

From Forecast Earth, an illuminating overview of the fate of some common items that typically pass through your hands in a matter of days or only minutes and may not pass through your thoughts at all. Read "In a landfill, how long does trash really last?" Then REDUCE (don't buy in the first place if you can help it, especially if it isn't fully recyclable or non-toxic and biodegradable), REUSE (borrow, trade, buy used, salvage, re-purpose, and opt for quality durable goods (and take care of them!) over purchasing disposable, single-use, highly packaged and processed, poorly made things), and finally RECYCLE (which includes composting, the original recycling system).

What this otherwise excellent article doesn't tell you is the upstream story. Less than 2% of the solid waste stream is post-consumer.* All that stuff that ends up in a landfill was quarried, mined, logged, drilled, grown and harvested, or bred and fattenend, shipped somewhere, refined or slaughtered or siloed, shipped, manufactured, shipped, packaged, shipped, warehoused, and shipped again on its way to your local retailer and, sooner or later, a landfill. Figure that for everything you throw away, 50-75 times--not percent, times--as much solid waste (read: land, soil nutrients, and raw materials rendered more or less permanently useless) is committed before you see something on the shelf. And that's not counting air and water pollution caused, water used, or fuel burned in the extraction, refinement, and transportation process.

Another important factor in recycling: materials returned for recycling don't actually get recycled unless it is cost-effective for the industry to do so, i.e. cheaper (in $) than extracting new materials and marketable as new products. Recycling almost always saves significant amounts primary resources and energy (especially in the case of glass and metal) but does not always save the manufacturer money. Newly extracted energy and raw materials are cheap in $ because ecological and social costs (arable land lost, habitat destroyed, air and water polluted, illness caused, communities displaced) are not figured in to the sticker price of extraction. Neither is disposal.

Even recycling, though much preferable to not recycling, takes up some amount of land, water, fuel, and raw materials for the bins, vehicles, machines, and factories. So think before you buy that container. Especially if it's plastic. The recycling record on glass, metal, paper, and cardboard is much better than that of plastic.

Would we think differently about garbage if everything we wasted had to remain in our home state? Our city limits? Our backyard? What if we had to pay by the pound for our permanent trash? Since money is a temporary and relative social construct while the health of the ecosphere is a concrete condition upon which all life and health depends, is it even possible to put a meaningful $ value on how our current consuming-and-wasting system affects what we leave, or don't leave, to the generations who will have to live with our mess?

The good news is that society finally seems to be catching on and starting to facilitate certain environmentally responsible habits. But we have a long way to go. We would do well to realize that the transition to a sustainable society is not going to be easy or convenient, and that 'going green' is less about fancy engineering and buying things with the right sticker, and more about not buying stuff, not using energy, disciplining ourselves to do without, and gaining the skills and tools to provide for ourselves close to home.

*Similar figures in both For the Beauty of the Earth by Steven Bouma-Prediger and "The Story of Stuff" online short film, see link at right.

Poem: The Future

by Wendell Berry in Given: Poems (2005):

For God's sake, be done
with this jabber of "a better world."
What blasphemy! No "futuristic"
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.

Quotable: Time and Eternity

I haven't read this book, but I think I might need to get around to it someday soon. My dear friend Abby hand-copied this for me onto a piece of green stationery and gave it to me one day when I was needing some encouragement and perspective. I still have the piece of paper about 5 years and 10 relocations later. I keep it posted or tucked somewhere in my room where I will run across it occasionally. It never fails to cheer me up, both because of what it says and because it reminds me of Abby's kindness and humor and our good days together in Decorah, IA.

" . . . and I really believe that the Irish are the least anxious people in the world. There is no secret either to this absence of anxiety on their part. It lies in the realization that man lives in eternity, and time therefore is an illusion which is not to be taken seriously. Time and eternity are, of course, the opposites of each other, so if you believe in one you cannot take the other seriously. Not taking time seriously dissolves the greater portion of frets and worries in this world. I recommend the attitude if you are harassed in your daily life."

- Leonard Wibberly in The Shannon Sailors

Related lovely thoughts from Story People artwork, another good thing from Decorah:

"Everything changed the day she realized there was just enough time for the important things in her life."

"Most people don't realize there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don't get too comfortable & fall asleep & miss your life."

I Might Be Irish

Lately I have been musing and sometimes angsting about the absurdity of human history and its corollary, the astounding propensity of human stupidity to trump human intelligence. Most of what happens you would not believe if someone made it up. "Truth is stranger than fiction," indeed. And I'm not sure what is worse--what happens by accident, or what people do on purpose fully convinced that it is a good idea. Considering our collective record and the staggering variety of what could go wrong, it's really a wonder that things 'work' as well and as often as they do. This is a large part of why I believe in Providence. Left to our own devices without benevolent nudges from the Spirit, we myopic, haphazard, and flighty humans would really make a mess of things. Often, the main difference between full-grown people and toddlers is that we have more practice being obstinate and making up (and believing) our explanations for our behavior.

It is absurd but also interesting that 3rd- or 4th- generation Americans still say "I'm (insert nationality here)" when we were born in the U.S., don't speak the language in question, more often than not have never visited (much less lived in) the place(s) of our ancestry, and may not know or even know of any relatives still living there. Fewer and fewer Americans can claim a hometown or home state, but we can tell you precisely what % of our gene pool came from which nation-state 100-200 years ago. I wonder if this is partly due to the fact that what it means to be 'American' carries such different connotations for different people, amongst ourselves Stateside but especially in relation to those who are actually from other places and still live there.

For some, U.S. citizenship is a hard-won privilege, for some it is grounds for unqualified entitlement, arrogance, and bigotry, for some it inspires sincere and humble if provincial filial pride, and for others it causes considerable conflictedness, embarrassment, guilt, and shame. The main thing we have in common here is displacement, and that doesn't make for much of an identity. So we tend to identify with an idealised, neutral, nostalgically tidy version of our pre-American heritage. Unless we are recently displaced from a heritage that we would rather forget or that divides us from our neighbors against our will. Then we do everything we can to erase the native identity and assimilate to whatever flavor of American-ness we think will serve us best.

We humans have a need to belong to something and come from somewhere. We want both something that makes us different from others and something that makes us the same. And so often we settle for the idea of connections or distinctions rather than going to the trouble of actually establishing and maintaining them. Strange creatures.

It's St. Patrick's Day. For some reason, this is a national holiday in a country that used to cruelly discriminate against Irish immigrants and before that was colonized by and then declared itself independent from an empire whose abuses arguably drove many of the Irish immigrants here where "all men are created equal" unless of course you happen to have been displaced due to imperial machinations (or agricultural fiascoes or a combination of the two) more recently than your neighbors. Forgetfulness does have some advantages, I suppose, as so many of us can cheerfully assert our ancestry percentages without a thought for how we and the people with whom we choose to identify have been the causes or the victims of displacement, or both. Besides being entirely or selectively oblivious to history, most of us 21st century Americans don't pay any homage to saints or the Catholic church or have any sort of association with Ireland. An embarrassing percentage of us couldn't even find the country on the map. But it's St. Patrick's Day. So we will wear green shirts and shamrock pins to work or school, and decorate with rainbows and leprechauns and maybe (if we know how to cook) prepare some corned beef and cabbage for the occasion. If nothing else, who doesn't like an excuse to drink beer?

Yesterday I was subbing as an aide in a classroom for developmentally delayed 3rd-and-4th graders. Some of the children were mostly or totally non-verbal so I could only conjecture what they were thinking and feeling as I sat and helped them glue bits of green and yellow construction paper to prefab paper shamrocks that were going to be hung around their classroom the next day. This is just the way things are. This is just what people do. I wonder a lot about that--how we come by our notions of 'the way things are' and 'what people do'. Everything we take for granted about the universe, every perception, every skill, every story, every habit, was new to us at some point.

I love to hear how kids explain what they or adults are doing, and I love it when they do or ask things that make me see the world in a way I hadn't before, or at least not in a while. Sometimes, among the little ones, I think that as a sub I am seen more as the new kid than as a teacher, maybe because I tend to be taking rather than giving instructions and I have to ask them questions about how things are done. Never mind that I am twice their height. The other day, a friendly child making conversation during coloring time asked me, "Do you know how to count?" "Yes," said I. Then he drew some circles, gently instructed me to count them, and when I had done so correctly he approved of the effort in a brilliant caricature of a benevolent-authority-figure voice. So funny. I suppose that if as a child you think of yourself as a complete person (why wouldn't you, unless you had been treated otherwise?) and spend most of your days being made aware of things you didn't know before, you would suppose that this is also true for other people, regardless of how tall they are. I wasn't there when he learned how to count. So the question was perfectly fair.

Most children are more interesting, more alive, than so-called adults whose ideas of "how things are" have ossified to the point that they no longer ask questions or entertain new experiences with wonder and surprise. It makes me sad when I meet kids who are already 'old' in this regard. Bored and suspicious and dogmatic, no curiosity, not wanting to see, or to know, or to befriend, or to try. What makes us conclude that we have nothing to learn that is worth learning, or that we are worth any more or less than anyone else? What makes us take so seriously our version of the story about our piddly fragment of space and time while regarding the glorious improbability of life and the world and other beings so carelessly?

I claim and engage my Swedish heritage almost exclusively, though I have only one 2nd-generation Swedish grandparent on each side. But I might be Irish. I have green eyes, auburn hair, and some freckles. I sunburn quickly and tan slowly. To the best of my knowledge my ancestry is 3/4 Nordic and 1/4 British. Considering the, er, 'cultural exchange' that took place as a result of Viking exploits ca. 1,000 years ago, and what with the raids, occupations, and border wars that went on across Scandinavia and various islands to the west all the way into the 20th century, there is a good chance that I come by Irish blood from several directions.

Potatoes came to Ireland, and to Sweden, from Peru and Chile, where they and the Inca civilization that developed them were 'discovered' in the 16th century by Spaniards hungry for gold. U.S. residents now eat more processed potato than any other vegetable, though only a tiny fraction of the thousands of varieties cultivated in Patagonia are produced here on a commercial scale. At 46% fried potatoes account for almost as much of our diet as all other vegetables combined. (Corn counts as a grain, not as a vegetable.) Processed tomato and iceberg lettuce are the runners-up. Read some fascinating potato-related history, legend, superstition, and literary quotations here.

If disaster were to befall the United States tonight, or an alien species invade, would they conclude that we worshipped clover, rainbows, and leprechauns based on the ubiquitous presence of shamrocks and related paraphernalia in our public school classrooms? And what will archaeologists two thousand years hence say about what they find in our cupboards, refrigerators, and grocery stores? Strange creatures.

Are you Irish?

Quotable: The Backdrop

By Annie Dillard in The Maytrees, a novel. Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of my all-time favorites. It's an unusual memoir in that it is not 'about' her but concerned almost entirely with her passionate observer's encounter with the mystery and significance of life's intricacies that most humans tend to overlook. (And are therefore, in my opinion, missing out.) I didn't realize she wrote fiction as well. Good stuff.

From the first few pages:

"The Maytrees' lives, like the Nausets',* played out before the backdrop of fixed stars. The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious. The slow heavens marked hours. They lived often outside. They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from saltwater to saltwater. Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects. Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading."

* The Nausets are a Native American people who used to live on Cape Cod where the story takes place.

From the last few pages:

"In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty, over the tide slacked holding its breath at the flood. She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a shot. Having limited philosophy's objects to certainties, Wittgenstein later realized he broke, in however true a cause, his favorite toy, metaphysics, by forbidding it to enter anywhere interesting. For the balance of Wittgenstein's life he studied, of all things, religions. Philosophy, Lou thought and so did Cornelius, had trivialized itself right out of the ballpark."