Today, Portland celebrated "Earth Day," yet another rediculous American holiday which was started in 1971 as a protest of nuclear power, oil culture, our increasing relayence on cars, and suburbia. These days, it has become nothing more then a festival of "green alternatives" things to buy, which despite being mass producted, are touted as "green."
Out of morbid curiosity, some of my friends and I went downtown to experience the Earth Day celebrations in one of our parks; also we had heard that a variety of businesses where giving away free goodies; trees, veggie starts, seed balls and the like. But I for one was disgusted by the spetical which greeted our eyes; teepees and booths set up promoting a variety of businesses, everything from home water purification systems to Firestone tires. Sure, there where some organizations represented there that I would consider truely environmental, such as Rising Tide (a group that works on river issues,) VE
We really do comercialize everything and sap its meaning out huh?
I bet those seedling thing were not 'Greenly' produced too. SOme people might say its a nice thought but all this stuff is crazy -tarded.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.~- Anais Nin
I never finished this post 'cuze I got so disgusted thinking about it...every day nearly I do stuff for the earth, seeing a bunch of people dancing about in a park, eating fig bars and buying "green" stuff for "earth day"...yuck!! We can do better then that folks!
Anyway, a really interesting group that was represented there was http://www.vhemt.org/ VHEMT. VHEMT stands for Violentary Human Extinction Movement...look it up, they are pretty rad!
Love ya,
CARRot
The Earth Day festivities at my university were pretty cool. We all hung out on the Quad, had a band playing, and there were multiple tables set up by clubs and organizations. A lot of the freebies were of recycled materials and there was a station were you could plant your own marigold or pansy. Also, there was this guy riding around presenting the "transportation of the future". It was called a conference bike, and about eight sets of pedals are all arranged in a circle and one person is the driver. It gets going pretty fast too.
There are still positive things to be found in Earth Day. It just depends on who is celebrating and who is just promoting their business.
Capitalism is the only way to make society wealthy and only wealthy societies can afford to care about and take care of the environment.
If you look around the world, most of the really nasty environmental disasters are found in former communist countries. And in poor countries people are too busy trying to feed themselves to care about the environment. The Mexican answer to trash disposal is to throw it in the street and drive on it until it becomes part of the road service or just wears away.
On the otherhand, in the United States, things are getting steadily cleaner. Our water is much cleaner then it used to be. Our air is much cleaner then it used to be. Our people are pretty good about not littering or polluting. Our vast wealth allows us to consider alternative energy solutions that are out of reach of other nations. All and all things are getting better.
But it really does not matter how small we make our individual footprint, if we keep expanding the number of people making footprints. Relentless population growth will be the demise of the earth if anything is. It is all the worse when it is combined with socialism caused poverty.
Because we have slaves overseas making stuff for us, so we don't have to bother polluting our own country...
As far as the whole population-out-of-control thing goes; I totally agree with you on that Jack...
So becoming a midwife is starting to feel a little too hopeful or optimistic for the times we live in; I feel like it might be more fitting with my beliefs to become a back-alley abortionist.
Love ya,
Carrot
What did the environmentalists think was going to happen when they passed all the laws that set-up an asymmetric economic situation between the cost of polluting here and the cost of polluting there?
OF COURSE the smokestack industries shifted to where it was cheaper to pollute. A lot of people prediucted this.
But, capitalism is a great system that generates incredible wealth. Those people are accumulating huge amounts of wealth as a result of having those industries. Soon, like us, they will be wealthy enough where they will find the pollution unacceptable. They will either clean-up those industries or they will drive them into the parts of the world that are still poor enough to tolerate them and the cycle of generating wealth and then the people demanding cleanliness will repeat.
Those of us that are still using our brains understand that the same asymmetric phenomena will occur with carbon emissions. We can punish our people and what's left of our economy as much as we want with carbon taxes and carbon caps and the result is that most of those emissions will just shift offshore causing huge damage to our economy and accomplishing nothing as far as reducing carbon emissions. The difference is that a lot of the world does not agree with the AGW Theory and it is not being very cooperative about causing actual warming that would lead people to believe it is true.
Of a calender i saw not too long back. This nifty little thing had all the dates, as usual, but something else as well i hadn't seen before. Did you know there is a holiday now on almost every day of the year? I can understand Earth Day, and St. Patricks Day and Columbus Day. But I really think Pickle Day is taking this a bit too far. What ever happened to just plain old normal days?
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"Put your best foot forward, just watch what you step in..."