It’s beyond obvious that America (and much of the rest of the world, too) is a throw-away society. Witness the “Cash for Clunkers” program. Looking at some of the so-called Clunkers that were turned in, many seemed like great vehicles to me. Alas, more scrap in our scrap yards.
I just got back from the recycling center – an adventure we perform two or three times a year. We just build up a huge load of stuff and do it all at once. We had 5 bins (action packers) of glass (a lot of wine bottles), 2 bins of glossy magazines and catalogs, 1 bin of cans (mostly dog food), and 2 bins of recyclable (#1 and #2) plastic bottles. We save newspapers for fire-starter in the winter. We don’t use many other cans. We’ll do a big cardboard load once a year. We compost our vegetable scraps. And our local recycling doesn’t take a few items, so those go into our small weekly trash pickup.
Nonetheless, we actually feel we might be a little more conservative in our packaging usage than most folks. We try to use cloth grocery bags (except when I go to the store by myself and often forget them); we seldom eat packaged (canned, frozen) veggies or other products; we don’t eat take-out (so don’t have those types of trash).
A few weeks ago we stayed in a rental cabin, and the owners had a thick book of “rules” for everything: trash (compost everything possible), water (only biodegradable soap), and energy savings. Yet they said that they didn’t recycle because they “have to pay for it.” Huh?
I just put a 10-spot in the glass-recycling donation jar today as the service doesn’t support itself (all my other recycles were “free”). Just about everything in our lives costs something to consume and to dispose of. We pay for trash collection whether we take it to the dump ourselves or have curbside pickup. Why should we expect recycling to be free?
Of course, it’s impossible to expect that we’ll ever really reduce our impact on the waste stream, although a few people and businesses are trying. But this “we have to pay for recycling” comment was just an amazing example of short-sighted self-interest that totally baffled me.
27 August 2009
05 August 2009
Life, Death, Universal Healthcare
Today was a day for thinking about how ephemeral and transient life is. I found a pile of Flicker feathers on the ground – Flicker feathers are supposed to be good luck, but not for this Flicker. Probably lunch for a Coopers Hawk. Yesterday, we found one (of two) baby robins from a nest in our barn dead on the ground. It’s said that only 1 out of 9 baby birds survive to adulthood (and for birds, that’s the first couple of months of their life, tops).
On the bird theme, a few weeks ago we found a Solitary Vireo nest with two totally different eggs inside – Cowbirds are “parasitic nesters” and will lay eggs in other birds’ nests, frequently the nests of Vireos. The Vireo feeds both young, but the Cowbird being so much larger forces the Vireo young aside. We never saw the outcome, preferring to not disturb the nest any further. Did either bird have more of a right to life?
On the other side of the coin, last summer we found a baby Cedar Waxwing on our lawn. There was no parent bird anywhere around; it had obviously fallen from a nest; and we know enough about birds to know that it would not have survived the night. We fed it mashed-up berries for 2 weeks until it could fly and (hopefully) survive on its own. We would have been derelict if we had not tried to save its life. (And, we think, we succeeded, as it returned to our porch for a couple of weeks following.)
A few weeks ago we had dinner with neighbors who’d just returned from Scotland and Ireland. We were discussing the “Clearances Villages” of Scotland (which we’d seen on a recent trip ourselves) and the Irish potato famine. We noted how life had very little value until maybe just a hundred years ago. Our neighbor is a physician, and even he concurred. (The Clearances Villages were towns on, mostly, the Isle of Skye, where the landlords decided in the mid 1800s that sheep were more valuable than people, and forcibly evicted all the residents. Many moved to Nova Scotia – “new Scotland” – but many also died.)
On the public consciousness now is the whole healthcare debate. How can any modern culture NOT believe in universal healthcare. Yes, socialized medicine, a la Cuba, France, Canada, England, and, oh, just about every other country in the world. Conversely, American healthcare tries to treat everything, in a vain effort to extract a few more days, weeks, months of life. But at what quality? My wife’s stepfather passed away a couple of years ago, suffering hospitalization, strokes, and other indignities in his final years. To what benefit? Might he have died with a bit more dignity if he’d had less “save-a-life” care and more preventive (and educational) care earlier in life?
Over dinner that night, our physician neighbor said that only 25% of all healthcare dollars actually go to treating patients. I was surprised it was that high. Is there any reason any health insurance company in America should even be in existence? As a society, we owe universal care – and, as I said, universal prevention – to every citizen.
On the bird theme, a few weeks ago we found a Solitary Vireo nest with two totally different eggs inside – Cowbirds are “parasitic nesters” and will lay eggs in other birds’ nests, frequently the nests of Vireos. The Vireo feeds both young, but the Cowbird being so much larger forces the Vireo young aside. We never saw the outcome, preferring to not disturb the nest any further. Did either bird have more of a right to life?
On the other side of the coin, last summer we found a baby Cedar Waxwing on our lawn. There was no parent bird anywhere around; it had obviously fallen from a nest; and we know enough about birds to know that it would not have survived the night. We fed it mashed-up berries for 2 weeks until it could fly and (hopefully) survive on its own. We would have been derelict if we had not tried to save its life. (And, we think, we succeeded, as it returned to our porch for a couple of weeks following.)
A few weeks ago we had dinner with neighbors who’d just returned from Scotland and Ireland. We were discussing the “Clearances Villages” of Scotland (which we’d seen on a recent trip ourselves) and the Irish potato famine. We noted how life had very little value until maybe just a hundred years ago. Our neighbor is a physician, and even he concurred. (The Clearances Villages were towns on, mostly, the Isle of Skye, where the landlords decided in the mid 1800s that sheep were more valuable than people, and forcibly evicted all the residents. Many moved to Nova Scotia – “new Scotland” – but many also died.)
On the public consciousness now is the whole healthcare debate. How can any modern culture NOT believe in universal healthcare. Yes, socialized medicine, a la Cuba, France, Canada, England, and, oh, just about every other country in the world. Conversely, American healthcare tries to treat everything, in a vain effort to extract a few more days, weeks, months of life. But at what quality? My wife’s stepfather passed away a couple of years ago, suffering hospitalization, strokes, and other indignities in his final years. To what benefit? Might he have died with a bit more dignity if he’d had less “save-a-life” care and more preventive (and educational) care earlier in life?
Over dinner that night, our physician neighbor said that only 25% of all healthcare dollars actually go to treating patients. I was surprised it was that high. Is there any reason any health insurance company in America should even be in existence? As a society, we owe universal care – and, as I said, universal prevention – to every citizen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)