What a Waste!

Normally we pay for dumping our garbage, whether cash at the local dump, fees to private contractors, or taxes to a municipality. Many towns and cities now require recycling. This last not only benefits the environment but also the pocketbook, since fewer materials go into the trash and hence fees for service can be lowered.

However, we are not paying for the services that are hauling away the largest portion of our waste: air, water, and soil. As is often the case, early action seems less urgent but is always cheaper than waiting.

All of us have a right to clean air, water, and soil, but that right isn’t free any more than our rights for free speech, religion, or assembly. These were bought at considerable cost and remain expensive today, as both past and current wars and legal battles remind us.

It’s hard to contemplate paying for what we have always considered free. Despite two wars, a lack of universal health care, a failing environment, and a widening gap between the rich and the rest, our leaders often talk of tax cuts and consumer spending.

We need to pay for our right to a clean environment. To do otherwise dooms us to declining living standards, declining health, and, in the long run, the extinction of life as we know it, at least on this planet.

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What Next With Waste - Public Policy

Elected leadership needs to pass cap and trade for carbon emissions, to empower the EPA to enforce the clean air and clean water acts, to invest in alternative forms of energy and public transportation, to change building codes, to limit the availability of products whose impact on the environment is particularly noxious, to abandon the impossible pursuit of energy independence in favor of reliance on a diversified portfolio of energy sources. In the long run, these policies will create jobs.

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What Next with Waste - Payment

To pay for these investments, we’ll need to reallocate funds and perhaps to raise taxes. I agree with Joe Biden that paying taxes is patriotic, provided public money is well spent on national priorities. Taxes allow us to share the burden of costly infrastructure projects that help us all save money. Paying taxes is a kind of sacrifice for the national good, an investment we can make for our neighbors as well ourselves. I emphasize, however, that we have to have confidence that overall our money is well spent, even if we disagree in some areas; otherwise, we will quickly become resentful.

We should also raise the tax on gasoline, to pick one fuel. Gas costs at least twice as much in Europe as it does here… and they do fine. It would force us to drive less, to abandon the SUV’s we have pigheadedly continued to drive until recently, and to demand more fuel efficient cars. Japan’s fleet is 68% more efficient than our own… and they do fine, too! We are more and more frequently using their cars!

According to our ability to pay, we should choose to purchase “green” products, that is, those that have been produced in a sustainable way and/or those that do no harm during use.

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What Next With Waste - Behavior and Attitude

We need to change our behavior collectively and individually. We need to drive less and more slowly, take public transportation, turn down thermostats, turn off lights, appliances, and electronics, line-dry clothes, recycle, and weatherize. Little things, sure, but consequently easy to do – if we can overcome our resistance to what we now consider “inconvenient”.

We need to be willing to retrain to become leaders in new industries. We did this in information technology, we can do it again in green technology. We will lose old jobs in mature and/or unsustainable industries, but we have a chance to get out in front and demand top dollar in new ones.

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Sleeping In

I am studying the pattern on the cotton quilt.
Once-red roses on each corner
Wrapped in once-green leaves.
So many washings too the stains
And took the colors too.
I wonder if once the stems were longer;
They seem stunted and out of place.
Did the seamstress grow impatient
With fingers too stiff and clumsy
To make her vision real?
Did impatience breed fatigue
Or lead to frenzied stitches later pulled.
They would unravel anyway
With time.
Sunlight pours from rose to rose, threadly white,
Displacing shadow in the petals
Then leaving darker pools behind where I can rest my eyes.
Has someone drawn fhe shades
Or is it time for dinner?

I am concentrating on the sounds below.
The clink of pots, the clack of tops,
The rush of water, the squeal of pipes,
The click of switch, the pop of gas,
The swish of kitchen’s swinging gate

The creak of stairs under stockinged feet,
And now someone’s breathing at the door.
Lying still on my left side, ear pressed hard to pillow,
I hear the beating of my heart in the russle of the case.
I worry I might hear it stop
And wonder what a life might be
In that brief but total silence.

“He’s still asleep,” I hear her say.
“It’s worse this time.”
Retreating.
I should arise and reassure
But the kitchen is so far away.

Phoebe

Packed tight as words in a poem
The chicks huddle in their nest
Under the eave of the kitchen porch.
I pass, I look to see what beauty they might become
They fall softly, wings beating
And flutter lamely into the night.
Phoebe is alone when next I see her.

Geriatrics

The gears in the clock once seen
Grind noisily in the space color used to fill.
I see the world anew.
Be happy with this new place?
How?
Since sound too
Teeters toward the exit door,
On flaccid legs, arms waving at balance,
And then cognition takes its turn
This last a blessing,
I suppose.