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Oh, my.
WE struck a nerve here, eh?
posted by
QuailNest
on December 9, 2011 at 10:57 PM
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Toxicity and Population threshholds
I don't buy it, Nautikos. There has been a change within my lifetime in the amount of garbage coming out of people's houses, the number of cars per household, the number of paved roads per thousand people, the number of highways per thousand people and the number of lanes on the highways. All of these are indicative of a qualitative change in the American lifestyle.
As an indication of the first, I remember us having one small garbage can to put our weekly garbage out for a family of five, but a few years after my younger brother was born in December of 1963, we had graduated to a full size can and then two. Clearly, my kid brother was not the cause of that several fold increase in toxicity! No, what happened was that we went from a one to a two car family, we got our milk from the A&P rather than having it delivered and, in general, more of our food came in non-reusable containers. ThoughI retained my preference for walking and riding a bicycle to go to church,school, sports, scouts and other activities, my mom was using her car more often for these purposes for the rest of the family.
Skipping ahead some forty years, I have been marooned -- by a confluence of divorce and the more automobile-based preferences of my two ex-wives -- in a sprawl neighborhood, working at locations that cannot be accessed by walking or public transportation. The town has given me a humongous garbage container which my neighbors have no trouble filling twice a week, but which I put out once every few months. The air stinks of sulphur here, especially during the winter when the trees and bushes don't filter it out. Of course, the trees have been mostly mangled and cut down to keep the telephone and electrical wires free from obstruction; the town, being controlled by the national Democratic Party, refuses to bury the wires. The ash tree in the back was cut down because the roots were claimed to have clogged the pipes in the winter.
I am doing the best I can as a pedestrian exiled to sprawl, but it irks me that our tax dollars still go to road construction and maintenance, that zoning laws and parking requirements prevent me from building my business at home as well preventing my neighbors from selling me useful items, that there is no tax on garbage here and that our legal system is deadset against the formation of sustainable communities, what I call colleges. There is so much that can be done to eliminate toxicity which would involve less intrusion of national and state entities, both governmental and corporate. However, we are stuck in the conservative-liberal dichotomy which utterly fails to address these local concerns. Of course, in sprawl there is no local.
posted by
cpklapper
on December 9, 2011 at 7:23 AM
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Stuff was a great example of the Left's propaganda machine.......control the children and you control the future.
posted by
Corbin_Dallas
on December 9, 2011 at 1:19 AM
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Francis
Francis
When we were 7 million, we didn't live very long, and we also weren't very 'toxic'. Even when we were 70 million, we we weren't terribly 'toxic', and we still didn't live very long. When we got to 700 million, things got a little dicier in spots, and we lived a bit longer, but overall - still not much 'toxicity'. But now that we're 7 billion and live really long (and this business about living longer is one of averages, of course!) we can't help being 'toxic' - you can't get 7 billion back on the farm! But don't worry, demographers project that, for a number of complicated reasons we won't go into here, the Earth's population will stabilize somewhere around 10 billion, and so will 'toxicity'...
(This first ended up in your other post by mistake...)
posted by
Nautikos
on December 8, 2011 at 5:29 PM
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I find it difficult to keep from being a toxic consumer even though I'd like not to be.
posted by
TAPS.
on December 6, 2011 at 1:50 PM
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