What is wrong with Americans; an example:
Beauty and the plastic beast
Gardens are good for the environment, right? They are green, and they let me offset a bit of the food that would otherwise have had to have been shipped to me. So to make a garden I rip out some sod, fire up the gasoline powered tiller and mix 5 big plastic bags of Miracle Grow into the soil. I drive the SUV to the garden center and buy a dozen plastic pots for potted plants, 10 flats of vegetable seedlings in flimsy plastic trays and a half dozen plastic bottles of chemical pesticides (the horticultural equivalent of a thermonookular hand grenade). I plant all this stuff in the Miracle soil (feeds for up to three months!) then pitch all the packaging in the trash (its all non-standard, dirty or contaminated with chemicals which makes it next to impossible to recycle). Then I spend the next three months avoiding the garden with the riding mower, applying pesticides, keeping the bunnies out and irrigating daily with 50 gallons of perfectly clean city drinking water from the hose.
And this is all 'green' and environmentally friendly, mostly because it makes people who can't be bothered to think through the consequences of what they are doing and where their stuff comes from feel like they are doing something worthwhile. In fact they've just done considerably more damage because they are so goal oriented (grow some big juicy red tomatoes) that they don't understand that they've bought so deeply into the consumption machine that they can't even see it when they are trying not to. Even when they think they don't want to consume, the only thing they know how to do is consume more.
Beauty and the plastic beast
Gardens are good for the environment, right? They are green, and they let me offset a bit of the food that would otherwise have had to have been shipped to me. So to make a garden I rip out some sod, fire up the gasoline powered tiller and mix 5 big plastic bags of Miracle Grow into the soil. I drive the SUV to the garden center and buy a dozen plastic pots for potted plants, 10 flats of vegetable seedlings in flimsy plastic trays and a half dozen plastic bottles of chemical pesticides (the horticultural equivalent of a thermonookular hand grenade). I plant all this stuff in the Miracle soil (feeds for up to three months!) then pitch all the packaging in the trash (its all non-standard, dirty or contaminated with chemicals which makes it next to impossible to recycle). Then I spend the next three months avoiding the garden with the riding mower, applying pesticides, keeping the bunnies out and irrigating daily with 50 gallons of perfectly clean city drinking water from the hose.
And this is all 'green' and environmentally friendly, mostly because it makes people who can't be bothered to think through the consequences of what they are doing and where their stuff comes from feel like they are doing something worthwhile. In fact they've just done considerably more damage because they are so goal oriented (grow some big juicy red tomatoes) that they don't understand that they've bought so deeply into the consumption machine that they can't even see it when they are trying not to. Even when they think they don't want to consume, the only thing they know how to do is consume more.
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