Hello, Inboxers. I hope everyone received a lot of nice
Earth Day presents this morning.
Seriously, sort of, the Big Day is upon us. Not just
upon us, but all over us, through and through us, in one
end and gurgling around and getting ready to jump straight
back out the hole it came in from. Here at Waste News we
have been so inundated with stuff about Earth Day
that we´re all ... if I were in a diplomatic mood I´d say
we´re numb to it. But frankly this deluge has brought on
an acute case of ad-nauseam nausea. And that, friends,
feels nothing like numb. Numb would be a welcome change
for the better.
A colleague who requested anonymity -- his initials may
or may not be JT -- suggested this idea for a column
headline today: "I Hate Earth Day -- There, I Said It."
I don´t hate Earth Day. I just wish the event produced
a higher percentage of genuinely useful ideas and a lower
percentage of me-too glomming-on. The glommers-on are out
in force this year like never before, and it may be months
before my e-mail "reading" routine recovers. I wonder how
many good ideas I´ve accidentally deleted whilst wading
through the daily flood.
(The state of spam-blocking software deeply disappoints
me. Some day some young e-geek is going to invent a
sophisticated, user-nonhostile spam-blocking program, and
he or she will be buying a mansion in Bill Gates´
neighborhood in no time.)
This annually growing throng of Earth Day
bandwagonistas remind of the people -- we all know someone
like this -- whose hearts grow three sizes on Christmas,
then shrink back to normal size for the rest of the year.
Let´s make Earth Day every day.
Funny, in the end I think the glommers-on serve a
useful purpose. They pile up a critical mass of white
media noise that actually helps nudge society -- industry,
consumers, all of us -- up the green mountain we´re slowly
climbing.
At the summit, I think, I hope, is sustainability. A
future where none of us have to worry about what type of
diminished planet we´re bequeathing to our grandkids.
Pete Fehrenbach is
managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this
column are collected in
the Inbox archive.
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http://www.wastenews.com
