Category: Recycling

I cut school in 8^th grade to go to Earth Day.  I asked the School Authorities if I could be excused to go to Earth Day, but they said No.  So I cut school and went.  It was the first time I ever cut school.

This was in Philly and Philly had one of the biggest Earth Day gatherings.  I remember there were a whole lot of people and I was near the back.  Ralph Nader spoke among many others.  I know I got a program because I still have it.  No thanks to me; my Mom put it in a plastic bag and kept it.

This was 1970 and there was a LOT of energy among the kids I hung out with.  Not just the kids I hung out with, but kids everywhere.  It was probably the peak year of all the mixing up that went on in the 60s and 70s.  There were antiwar riots all across the country.  Kent State happened.  Richard Nixon was insisting on Peace With Honor in Vietnam and sent troops into Cambodia, and there were more riots.  Nixon unleashed Spiro Agnew to stir up the “Silent Majority” against the kids in the streets.  But the kids in the streets were the children of the Silent Majority, so what he stirred up was fear and distrust across dinner tables.  But somehow at the same time Richard Nixon was creating EPA and signing giant pieces of environmental legislation:  Clean Air, Clean Water, Endangered Species.

There was a lot of ferment.  The thing about us kids of the 60s and 70s was that we were different, and we were going to make things different.  And we have.  We’re in charge now.  We’re in our fifties and sixties.  We are the people with power, the bosses, the people running the government and big companies.  We have made things different.

We have made them worse.

We are squeezing out of existence America’s greatest achievement, a society built on a large and secure middle class.  We are implementing policies that make the richest among us even richer, while the middle class shrinks and slides backwards.

We are spending trillions of dollars on “Defense” in ways that make Vietnam look cheap and smart in comparison.  Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could at least argue that Vietnam was part of a global power play.  But Iraq?  Afghanistan?  Given the keys to the Pentagon, my generation is wasting trillions of dollars, making enemies around the world, and leaving the U.S poorer and less secure.

We are spending money and running up debt at a pace that staggers imagination.  Government debt.  Personal debt.

We are replacing a credo that greed is something to guard against with one that greed is good – the greediest are the most successful.  We have systematically dismantled regulations that have kept personal and corporate greed in check.  The winners are the greediest among us; the losers are everyone else.

We are condoning, often encouraging, often doing it ourselves, the destruction of rain forests, depletion of oil, exhaustion of resources, extinction of species.  We are implementing policies that promote the consumption of Earth’s resources as if they are ours and no one else’s, now and forever, and will never run out.

We are denying that humans can have and are having an impact on the global environment and climate, even as the evidence presses in on us from all directions.  We are dithering while the Earth is heating up.

In 1970, I and the kids I hung out with and the kids at Earth Day and the kids marching against Vietnam were pretty sure we knew who was the enemy.  It wasn’t the Vietnamese.  It was boring, greedy, self-absorbed, complacent middle-aged people who could justify any wrong, as long as it didn’t interfere with their comfort and self-indulgence.  We were right.  That was an enemy worth fighting.

What we didn’t know was who we’d become.  Forty years on, the enemy is us.

Here’s a fact about America.  We have five percent of the world’s population, and we spend forty-one percent of the world’s defense budget.  We spend seven times as much on defense as China, and more than ten times as much as Russia – four times as much as China and Russia put together.  We spend more on defense than the next fifteen countries in the world combined.

Who is it we are defending ourselves from?  It must be the other people who spend a lot on armies and weapons, right?  Then who are they?  Well, there’s China at number 2.  Then there’s France (Napoleon?).  Then there’s England (they want their colonies back?).  Russia (aren’t they friends now?).  Then there’s Germany, Japan, Italy, Saudi Arabia, India, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Spain, Australia.  They really want to have a go with Uncle Sam?  I thought they were buddies.

And what is it we’re defending ourselves against?  The only attacks on the U.S. since World War II have been 20 guys with box cutters, one guy with a shoe bomb, and a dufus who tried to blow up his underwear.  All of those guys were on airplanes, and we have the TSA to deal with that.  TSA is not in the defense budget.  Apparently they should be.

Speaking of which, where was our defense budget on 9/11?  9/11 was a clear day and they hijacked four big, slow airplanes.  Our Defense Department has hundreds of small, fast airplanes that have all sorts of radars and missiles and guns, and they have other radars and satellites that can count the flowers in your back yard.  But they couldn’t find four big slow airplanes heading for NYC, the White House, and the Pentagon?  The Pentagon?  For $900 billion a year, they couldn’t defend their own headquarters?

We spent trillions of defense dollars in Iraq.  Our President told us that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which he didn’t, and was poised to use them in cahoots with Al Qaida, which he wasn’t.  Either our President was making things up, coincidentally in time for an election, or our defense budget isn’t buying us much in the way of intelligence.  I don’t know which I want less to believe.

We’ve spent another trillion or so in Afghanistan, where the biggest threat to the U.S. was some camps in the desert where they taught people to make shoe and underwear bombs.  Now I think they run those camps on the internet.  And if we wanted to get rid of camps in the desert, don’t we have those satellites to find them and drones to take them out?

So what is it again we’re defending ourselves against?  Well, there are many real threats to the security of the United States?

There’s poverty.  Poor people envy rich people and try to bring them down.  But the U.S. spends proportionally less on peaceful foreign assistance than any other developed country on earth.

There’s overpopulation.  The biggest threat to humankind is too many humans competing for limited resources.  But our government spends virtually nothing on population programs.  (The best population control, by the way, is poverty relief, but see above.)

There’s our own spending and debt.  The biggest direct threat to U.S. security is the fact that we owe so much money to so many countries (particularly that one called China), and are so utterly reliant on them to pay our bills.  Defense is the biggest item in the U.S. budget, and, by far, the big item over which we have the most control.  But it’s a sacred cow.

There’s international relations.  Friends don’t attack you, they don’t support terrorists, and they back you up if you need help.  But our foreign policy in the past decade-plus has made outright enemies of much of the world, alienated most of the rest, and created multiple terrorist breeding areas.

There’s dependency.  As long as we depend on other countries for the things we need most – like oil – we’re at their mercy; we either have to appease them or bully them.  But in 40 years since the first oil crisis, we have done practically nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.  And in the name of “defense” we have made enemies of much of the Middle East, where most of that oil comes from.

Why again do we spend so much on defense?  Or, more precisely, why do we mis-spend so much on defense.  We spend a lot, but we buy very little.

Fire up the Wayback Machine. If you don’t remember the Wayback Machine, then you can probably stop reading this anyway.

The Wayback Machine belonged to Mr. Peabody. Actually I’m pretty sure he invented it. Mr. Peabody was a white dog who wore black eyeglasses. And a clip-on bow tie. It had to be a clip-on because he wasn’t wearing any clothes. He talked and acted like a professor, and he hung out with a sort of dumb kid with a high voice called Sherman. Some question of history would come up, and Mr. Peabody and Sherman would get into the Wayback Machine, and go back and check it out. Not only would they check it out, they would fix it. Like George Washington would be about to plant a cherry tree, and Mr. Peabody would suggest maybe he should cut it down instead. Or Charles Lindbergh was about to fly to New Jersey, and Mr. Peabody would suggest France.

So, Wayback Machine, August 29, 1986. The Red Sox are up three and a half games over the Yankees, and they are slipping. Again. They’re twenty games over five hundred, but they started the month twenty games over five hundred. They’re going nowhere. The Yankees, the #$%*&^@ Yankees, are on their heels. Yet another Red Sox season is slipping away.

And then what happens? For the next three weeks the Sox go on a tear. By September 18th they’re ten games up and the season is basically over. They clinch on the 28th.

What happened in those three weeks? This is what happened: Bill Buckner stepped up and carried the Red Sox. In those three weeks when a lot of the Sox were flailing around, Bill Buckner batted .350 with a .425 on-base percentage. He struck out exactly twice. In eighteen games he had twenty-one RBIs, that’s a 189 RBI pace. Eight home runs, that’s a 72 HR pace. He was the guy, when the ship was sinking, who didn’t panic. He provided the lifeline and the other Sox grabbed on and pulled themselves together and went on to the World Series.

Where, as we all know, Billy Buck made an error in Game 6. Actually, it was Bill Buckner who made the error. Before that, he was Billy Buck, he was one of the guys. After that, and ever since, he turned into Bill Buckner, some foreigner interloper, some goomer wearing idiot black high-tops because he could barely walk, whose only place in Red Sox history is that he lost the World Series.

If that’s what you choose to remember. But no one loses the World Series. No one lost the World Series. Baseball is a team game. McNamara pulled Clemens. Schiraldi couldn’t close out the Mets. Gary Carter refused to go down. Ditto Kevin Mitchell. Ditto Ray Knight. Bob Stanley made a wild-pitch; Rich Gedman didn’t catch it. The Sox didn’t get it done in Game 7. Team game.

In August, when the team called the Red Sox were foundering, Bill Buckner carried the team.

What does this have to do with recycling? Darned if I know. Somewhere the subject of Bill Buckner came up, and what I remember about Billy Buck is all those days and nights in August and September when you were biting your fingernails down to nothing because the Sox were choking AGAIN, and it was Billy Buck who came up with the hits that kept the team running, and eventually they ran away with it. Team game, team player.

Maybe that’s what it has to do with recycling, and with protecting the environment in general. Team game. We’re all pointed toward the same goals: keep usable stuff from being thrown away; make some money, save some money; keep resources in the economy. It’s a tough game; there are always Yankees with a better deal that’s not really a deal or a budget hammer or an easier way out. If we think we’re in it for ourselves, maybe we’ll start taking those deals. But if we keep on pulling toward the same goals, if we remember it’s a team game, we’ll get there, we’ll beat the damn Yankees.

Sometimes we’ll get it right: Billy Buck in August. Sometimes we’ll screw up: Bill Buckner, October 25. But it’s a team game. Remember that, and we all get ahead

I had the great good fortune this spring to drive up and down long stretches of the Blue Ridge Parkway through North Carolina and Virginia. If you have never done that, you should; it is for sure one of the two or three most beautiful roads in the United States. You should drive it in the spring, before the leaves come out. Then it’s like winning the trifecta. You get long views over the mountains and foothills; you get the first blushes of greens clothing the mountainsides; and you get the incomparable bursts of white and color in the fruit trees and dogwoods and azaleas. You also get no people – you can drive for miles and miles and miles with this most beautiful road in America all to yourself.

Returning to New Hampshire from one of these trips, I had the equally good fortune to drive the Taconic Parkway up the east side of the Hudson River. Not the grand mountains and long views of the Blue Ridge, but just as beautiful in its own way. Rolling hillsides of orchards and woods and pasture, for miles and miles and miles. Rip van Winkle country, and for all the world little changed since his time.

That drive was pointed toward Northampton, Massachusetts, where I was giving a talk, about mattress recycling of all things. Now mattress recycling is not the most thrilling of topics. Especially when you get to talking about bedbugs, then it gets to be sort of gross. But what I was reminded, driving those days, through those landscapes, is that it’s not really about recycling. It’s not really about mattresses. It’s not really about the “waste stream”. It’s about this beautiful rich country and this one-of-a-kind planet.

Mattress recycling is about a way to live on this planet. It’s about a carry-in, carry-out policy toward Planet Earth. It’s about touching the Earth in our lives in a way that leaves it for others to enjoy after us.

The Blue Ridge wasn’t always the Blue Ridge. There was a time when it was logged and scraped bare, when it was a desolate landscape of stumps and tangled and rotting brush. The beautiful Blue Ridge I drove this spring is all second growth; it is a landscape recovered from gluttonous exploitation. And we’re still exploiting, as bad or worse than ever. Drive just a few ridges west from the Parkway and there are the stumps not of trees but of whole mountains scraped off and shoved into the valleys next door, to reach a coal seam a few feet thick. There are hundreds of square miles of these flattened mountains and used-to-be valleys (Google “mountaintop removal mining”). Drive a little north into Pennsylvania and there are whole landscapes toxified by mine tailings.

And that’s why mattress recycling is important. Recycling makes possible Blue Ridge Parkways. Not recycling produces mountaintop removal. Recycling makes possible landscapes like the Hudson Valley. Not recycling produces toxic mine dumps.

It’s not about the mattresses, it’s about the landscapes. It’s about using the Earth gently, about preserving landscapes for others to enjoy after us, about leaving them the resources to enjoy the Earth as we have. The Earth provides plenty of resources for us to do that, if we use the resources wisely.

That’s why we recycle mattresses.