I just took a walk around my block, which adjoins your block. I picked up 15 plastic drink containers and 5 plastic bags. This has become a daily dogwalk ritual for me. I don’t have to go far to find the plastic litter. Some days I see the plastic bottles and bags in the storm drains. I stop, dig out the bottle or bag, pull aside the other detritus and allow the water to flow in. Sometimes people driving by point and laugh.

What blew me away though (and I could find no recourse) was that while I watched a podcast of Congressional Hearings on the Tri-State water wars (between Georgia, Alabama and Florida) each of the congressional representatives had a plastic bottle of water next to their microphone. As I listened to the issues of water scarcity killing one of the Western Hemisphere’s most productive estuaries so that golf courses in Atlanta can be watered, I search for a way to convey my disappointment to the representatives who did show up for the hearing (Steven LaTourette didn’t show). But I couldn’t send email to someone else’s rep. My emails would not be accepted by the folks who were listening to these tales of loss of jobs, loss of resources, loss of ways of life in communities all along the Flint, Chattahoochee and Apalachicola Rivers, in the Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf of Mexico because I did not vote for them – don’t live in their districts.

I sat back and thought about how we don’t get it. The world is one big ecosystem - push it in here and it pops out over there.

It is easier to think in sound bites about plastics floating in the Pacific or coal fired power plants in China and India being “a problem” that someone will have to deal with someday. But it is more gut wrenching to visit New Orleans and see the devastation there and realize that Cleveland neighborhoods look strikingly similar and not because of flooding, but because of a different breed of disdain and indifference.

It is encouraging to know that George is plowing through the podcasts at the Long Now Foundation’s website. I encourage others to visit, watch and listen to talks about the Clock of the Long Now. It is encouraging to visit Wiserearth.org and see that some environmental and social justice orgs in NEO have signed on and signed up. It is encouraging to read Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest and know that millions of environmental and social justice organizations are working round the clock to stem the tide of indifference. But it does astonish me to realize how we just can’t seem to grasp that we have to address these issues on a personal level. We have to change the way we live. As Hawken says, the game we have been playing is viewed as a finite game; someone wins and someone loses. We have to begin to recognize that the game we want to be playing is an infinite game - one where we can adjust and change the rules so that we continue to play. He addresses this here on the Paula Gordon show: Suicide Interventions - http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/phawken/index.html

Here’s the deal; we’re all in this together. The plastic in the belly of the albatross is our problem, not the problem of “some bird that flies along over the Pacific”. The fall out of air pollutants or the sequestration of coal sludge in Meigs County is our problem, not just the problem of some yahoos who live in rural Appalachian Ohio. Plastic bags that take hundreds of years to degrade and were part of the cause of death for thousands in Mumbai because they blocked the flow of storm drains is our problem not just theirs. Mountain top mining in Virginia and West Virginia that pollutes the water in surrounding communities to provide coal for our electricity is our problem, not just theirs. Etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum…

If we see the earth as a spaceship and go further to invoke the comparison of a lifeboat, it is of course of vital concern to everybody on the boat if the crew or the passengers start polluting their supply of food and water, distributing supplies on a grossly inequitable basis, knocking holes in the bottom of the boat, or worst of all trying to blow the boat out from under us. - William Burroughs This quote is from the NOVA Convention 1978

Vital concern…it is of course of vital concern to everybody on the boat.

Let’s have a plastax for one. That’s one way we could raise money to help solve some of these environmental problems. No need to wait for the river to burn again to get moving on these things, eh?

One piece of good news about the Great Lakes: water levels had fallen for the last few years, but this year, because of all the snow, the water level is expected to rise considerably.