Feeling Gravity's Pull: Thanks to the faithful reader who sent in this item about a sewer district in British Columbia that has started selling, or trying to sell, a soil amendment containing biosolids.

 

The nutrient-rich product, called SkyRocket, reportedly makes plants grow freakishly large. But for many of the sapient hominids whose digestive systems produce the main ingredient that goes into SkyRocket, the idea of putting anything containing you-know-what onto anything they or another member of their species may eventually eat -- well, frankly, it weirds them out.

 

So for the sewer district in question, trying to persuade people to buy the product has been an uphill battle. And we all know what they say about the odds of you-know-what flowing uphill.

 

Speaking of Sapient Hominids: Here's an interesting think piece from this past Sunday's Dallas Morning News about environmentalism, written by an eminent British conservative, Roger Scruton. In it, Scruton explains why he thinks conservatives have been reluctant to embrace green values while liberals have jumped all over the cause.

 

Some of Scruton's assertions about liberals are debatable. Any time someone who conspicuously plants his flag in one political camp sets out to psychoanalyze the other group, the result is likely to have bias in it. That's certainly the case here.

 

But Scruton's larger point is sound: that proper environmental stewardship is fundamentally a matter of conscience, a byproduct of every person keeping his or her own house in order. And I agree that it's imperative that we recognize our planet as the magnificent source of wealth it is -- but also as a finite, damageable one that we must do out utmost to preserve and pass on to our descendants.

 

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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