Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Lets Burn This Mother Down! oh wait... we already are.



i hate earth day. i really hate it. so much.

why do i hate earth day? where do i start? well first, remember when you were little and you asked your folks "there is a mother's day, and a father's day, so why is there no kid's day?" and they were all "because EVERY day is kid's day" and in your head you said "bullfuckingshit."? remember that? well here is the thing EVERY day should be Earth day. the fact that every day we don't take minute to realize how insane it is that we are alive on this rock flying through space, and that this rock has just the right amount of everything to let us live, is crap. total crap. Every day should be Earth day. which really means that NO day should be Earth Day. we shouldn't have to pick a day each year to be like "oh right, pollution sucks, or something".




there is a reason Captain Planet sucked as a TV show. its because we shouldn't have to be told that saving the earth is cool. it should just be known. it should be part of our mindset from a young age, the same way breathing is. we shouldn't have to have a pale body builder in red underwear and a green mullet to let us know that shitting where you eat is a bad idea.

As we all know, Earth Day is a day where we make ourselves feel better about being the most destructive inhabitants on the face of the planet, by wearing the color green, and maybe even thinking about possibly starting to someday if we're in the right mood, and we've got nothing else going on, finally start reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Or not. i mean i think i got the basic idea on Wikipedia, so.... no need to read that actual book. plus i totally know what she is gonna say. so..yeah.

but i am getting ahead of myself. For those who don't know, the US Earth Day idea was started by a senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson. the story goes that he saw an oil spill was disgusted, and decided that Americans needed to learn and talk more about the environment. I realize that it is hard to believe that a politician saw and oil spill and didn't automatically blame the other political party, or start justifying it, or looking for blame, then saying "SEE!!! this is why we should have nuclear energy!" but i suppose it could've actually happened this way.

since then, (for the most part) we have celebrated Earth Day, at some point in April. nobody can really remember when. What does it mean in the US to celebrate Earth Day? who fucking knows. i still have to go to work. Some other holidays i don't have to go work. But i guess the Earth just isn't as important as say.... a lost Italian captain with a soft spot for slavery and genocide. Some things truly do deserve a national holiday.

Sometimes on Earth Day there are concerts (using large amounts of non-renewable energy) to celebrate the Earth. Sometimes washed up former Vice-presidents, and other famous people give vague talks about change. great. thats SUPER helpful. but has it changed anything? not really. Celebrating the wonderous miracle that is the planet we live on by putting on shitty concerts, and buying "green" goods, is like celebrating the sacrifice of someone's life for the sins of all humanity by pretending a gigantic rabbit with a basket lays colored eggs filled with diabetes for children to search for.


well i am sick of being the only one at the party who is in a bad mood about this shit. so in honor of one of my least favorite holidays i would like to present the jury with these fun party pooper ideas, that hopefully will ruin your Earth Day:


the recycling symbol is a corporate logo.
thats right. that 3-arrow triangle we all know and love, and have on our fair-trade hemp t-shirts we paid $40 for are no different then the Coke symbol. see back in the day, the mess of empty bottles from soda, juice, etc was dealt with by the producers of these products, not the consumers. Bottlers used to use glass bottles, not plastic, for their products and then would collect them when people were finished with them, take them back to the factories, and reuse those bottles. after all, they PRODUCED the trash, so shouldn't they take care of it? however a wave a change happened with bottlers, and soon they pushed the responsibility of dealing with this trash onto the consumer. they started talking about civic duty of consumers, and soon recycling the trash was OUR job, not theirs. Reacting to the first Earth Day, the Container Corporation of America held a contest for students to come up with a logo to "raise awareness of environmental issues". the now famous triangley-arrow thingy was created by a college student. and the rest is history.



The Crying Indian is a Fake and a Corporate Stooge.
we've all seen it. the classic ad and billboards of the (non-desrcipt)Native American crying as he sees trash being thrown on the ground. or floating on a river. or both. well guess what people, i've got 2 mind bombs i'm about to throw at you. number 1: the Native American in that PSA was Sicilian-American. Not even a teeny bit Native American. nope. He lied about it pretty much until he died. whoops.


here is the other fun fact: that ad was made by Keep America Beautiful, a corporate front for greenwashing. as documented in Heather Rodgers' brilliant book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, KAB was created in response to the (dirty, hippie) state of Vermont's attempt to outlaw disposable containers. All of the sudden the national conversation was changed from "why do we have all this awful plastic?" to "why aren't you people putting the trash in the trash can?!?! do you like it when Indians cry?!?! you heartless bastards!!!" and the next thing you know, we're all talking about litter and not the fact that companies are producing toxic products for us to consume. awesome. also they get some of their funding from Sherwin-Williams, the "paint the world" people, with the most depressing logo ever, of the earth getting dumped with a bucket of paint. KAB also gets funding from Phillip Morris, the death company. so.... do i need to say more?


Recycling is a load of crap.
ok, hold up. its not COMPLETELY a load of crap. the idea of reusing and recycling things is not a bad idea, and should be encouraged. However, one thing recycling does do, is take everyone's mind off the idea of consumption. "we can consume as much as we want, because the when we are done with the plastic, glass, metal etc. we used, it can just be recycled, right?" this also, as mentioned before, takes the pressure off of producers. they're not creating waste. "they're creating recycleable material. and maybe even GREEN JOBS!!! can you even imagine?!?!"

now some of you are probably saying "ok, but we have all these bottles, and we need to do SOMETHING with them". this is true. but if we never address the fact that we continually create these things that are detrimental to the environment, bad things are gonna happen. the mindset of recycling cuts out the part where we talk about why the hell we have all this plastic and metal, and paper to begin with.

and then there is this: recycling often isn't even recycling. boom. mind explosion. assuming you separate all your this from your that, there is still the question of how much of the stuff you put in that adorable blue bucket that you put on the street (again, assuming your city/town has a recycling program) ends up actually being recycled. Recyclable materials are essentially a commodity. there are some that are more valuable then others. and as usual, when money is the bottom line, we get screwed.

"but wait" you say, "Free Market yada yada, and people will make the right choices when money is involved, and Barry Goldwater and stuff, and something else about markets." ok, i'll play this game. even though deep degrees of poverty and a huge gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" should pretty much have made us all realize that this line of thinking is NOT WORKING. but whatever, lets do this. people will do the right thing because its monetarily in their best interest. sure. so lets try that out. here is a quote from the lovely Discovery Channel explaining it much better than me.

"Unless you follow your recyclables through the entire process until they're made into new prodcuts it's impossible to say for certain if your materials are actually being recycled. But, logically, the reason you can feel assured that most of your recyclables actually get recycled is because they have a dollar value."

great! i guess we've got nothing to worry about. except here's the thing, Elizabeth Royte in her fantastic book Garbage Land, does actually follow her recyclables through the entire process, and guess what? *spoiler alert* LOTS OF SHIT DOESN'T GET RECYCLED. it gets trashed because its useless to the companies that buy recycled commodities. either its such low quality that its impossible to recycle, or its more expensive to recycle it than it is to produce new stuff. of course its never brought up what sort of environmental repercussions there might be from producing new stuff. its more expensive to recycle, and so they don't. which proves what is implied in the Discovery quote: its all about money. and when its all about the money, we get screwed.


at best, only 50 percent of what gets thrown in the recycling bin actually gets recycled. and since that percentage looks pretty small when you realize how much we don't even throw in that bin, things start to look grim. even if half of the new stuff are made from recyclables, you still have the other half that we need to make from somewhere. and as things get recycled, their quality downgrades. so eventually that recycled bottle can't get used, and ends up in a landfill. but thats ok, because landfill's aren't that bad right?


Landfills Will Murder Your Children. Seriously.

Even the hardest of hard hearts must kinda pause for a moment when thinking about landfills. "So... we take all this disgusting garbage and toxic mess... and then we bury it. in the ground. ok...um... then what?"


exactly. then what? one of the main problems with landfills, is that eventually they fall apart. it might not be in my lifetime, but it probably will be in our kids' lifetimes. the idea behind landfills, is that eventually someone smart enough will figure out how to deal with all that nasty shit. because we can't burn it. well, we can and we have, but the awful smoke from burning trash looks terrible, and is toxic, and eventually towns and cities don't like the idea of inhaling that stuff. so more and more that option is going away.


we could send it out to sea. but then this happens.


so looks like its just landfills. however most landfills in the US are under private contract. you can't go visit them, to make sure they are following regulations. In Gone Tomorrow, Rodgers talks about how landfill linings are what keep the toxic shit from getting into the dirt and the water. so they've got it covered? awesome. but not really. see, private company has a contract with the State for say 75 years. the lining lasts 100 years. meaning when the company is done with its contract, the responsibility is now on the State, or more likely the local people. when that lining wears away, and people start getting sick from their water being contaminated, nobody is responsible for it. fun stuff, right?


Al Gore is a Turd.
Not literally. but certainly in a lots of ways, he is a poop. There are tons of reasons why Gore is not quite the environmental leader we assume/wish he was. but i just want to focus on a teeny tiny bit of his film. Since many people were really moved by An Inconvenient Truth this is a hard pill for a lot of liberals to swallow. Its not that the facts in the movie were wrong, or that it should be that hard to believe that a guy who had Joe Lieberman as his running-mate cares AT ALL about us. its really that fun little bit in the end of the film where after feeling like we are screwed for 90 minutes, he lists all the wonderful things we can do to lower our carbon emissions. i certainly felt better. i almost wrote my CongressMAN. almost. almost. however what he fails to mentions is that if EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the US followed the guidelines at the end of the film, the carbon emissions for our country would only drop 22 percent. to have a real effect, the WORLD carbon emissions, not just the US of A, BUT THE CARBON EMISSIONS OF THE WHOLE WORLD, need to go down 75 percent. What Gore's guidelines do is instill a false sense of hope, that shouldn't exist. He makes us believe that all we have to do is buy the right lightbulb or shower head things will be great. don't STOP buying, just buy green stuff. no need to change our consuming culture. just "go green" and everything will be ok. well it won't. so stop falling for this shit.

You can cause an environmental catastrophe, and a year later nobody cares.
British Petroleum. you sly motherfuckers. Not only did you DESTROY the gulf, and pretty much the entire coast of Louisiana, but you got paid 10 million dollars to do it. and yes that is more than the entire budget for the Environmental Protections Agency. Hats off.


Saving the Earth is Against the Law.

Sometimes people take the shit humans do to the earth personally. sometimes people get pushed to a point where they don't want to feel helpless, and want something to get done, and since they have read history books, they know that waiting for the State to fix things is not very productive. So sometimes they feel the need to act. Sometimes they protest. Sometimes they get in peoples' faces about it. Sometimes they try to stop people from possibly bringing a species to extinction and thereby changing the entire biological balance of the ocean, and really the world. Sometimes they free animals that have been tortured. Sometimes they burn shit down. however they rarely, IF EVER, hurt people. but they are still considered terrorists in many places. and then they get sent to jail. They are terrorists and BP gets 10 million dollars. figure that shit out.


Holy shit we love Oil!
i mean we REALLY love oil. if you are reading this on a computer, wearing clothes you did not personally make, then you are literally enveloped in oil and the products of oil. Oil dictates everything about how we live. and guess what? at some point we'll run out.

you know what? instead of me talking about it, just watch Michael Ruppert drop some knowledge.


Now, Michael Ruppert may be nuts, but at this point, the people who are considered sane aren't making a whole lot of sense to me. also, that clip sums up what would've taken me forever to write down, and no doubt i would've peppered with tons of curses, so just watch the clip, ok?



honestly i don't even care anymore. Wear green on Earth Day. do the neighborhood trash pickup. buy some locally grown whatever. make yourself feel good. because that is all Earth Day is about. making ourselves feel good about something we are totally sucking at. its failing the math quiz, but having our mom's still have Dunkaroos and YooHoo waiting for us when we get home. We know we don't deserve it but when she asks us how the test went, we lie to her and to ourselves, and say "i knocked it out of the park!" so she lets us go watch DuckTales. and while TV takes away the pain, and we sit, filled with fake joy at our success, and stuff 7 different types of high-fructose corn syrup into our crumb covered mouths, we have a moment of clarity. just a quick one. a little moment that passes, where we think "oh wait. i was lying to myself". and for a second you realize that those Dunkaroos , that neighborhood cleanup, that local broccoli, those energy saving light bulbs, that Prius, that shorter shower, those fair trade sustainable recyclable whatevers, don't mean a damn thing.






happy earth day. go drink your fucking YooHoo.