Westward Ho!

Paper Or Plastic?

Like a good Californian -- and believe me, there are bad ones -- I'm a neurotic environmentalist and sustainability nut. Sure, those are easy claims to make these days when so many of the permaculture movement's hangers-on are so shallow (scroll down for painfully hilarious article commentary). But I really do lose quite a bit of sleep worrying about where the things we consume actually come from and where they go, and what they're made of, and how much energy is used to produce and recycle them, and whether the material is carcinogenic and/or toxic. Even the word "recycling" is fairly meaningless until we define our terms and look closer into the process at the local and larger scales.

I've never wanted to be one of "those" people, and I'll readily concede that I'm still sometimes guilty of choosing convenience over correctness, but I do try. Someone's gotta. The most important thing to remember re sustainability is to choose your battles wisely. Environmental, financial, social, and personal health concerns often have their own separate sets of issues and mitigation tactics. Figure out what's most important to you and fight the good fight, but don't put yourself in the looney bin if you can't be all things to all species. That said, don't be superficial either; think holistically about the world you'll be passing down to your kids.

A while ago, I picked up Daniel Imhoff's Paper Or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World (Sierra Club Books, 2005). The book is a well-researched info guide to one of the world's biggest industries, demystifying what most of us take for granted -- the stuff our stuff comes in. I appreciate the at-a-glance sidebar blurbs, such as the one I'm excerpting below, "Beverage Containers":

Foil Pouch
Advantages: Convenient, lightweight, and easily compressible.
Challenges: These multilayered, nonrecyclable materials are destined for the landfill. Soft-drink companies are rapidly adopting this packaging system, often to package a high-fructose product.

Single-Serving Plastic Bottle (accompanied by pictures of the various bottles mentioned below)
Advantages: Flexible and lightweight. Sometimes burned for energy generation.
Challenges: Only #1 and #2 have high-end recycling markets. Plastic #3-#7 lack a strong recycling infrastructure. Pollute waterways and marine areas. Oxygen barriers, fillers, and other coatings on bottles prohibit recycling. Plasticizers and other additives can potentially be toxic.

Gable-Top Carton (e.g. cardboard container of milk)
Advantages: Long-distance solution. Can be repulped and downcycled into paper towels and tissue paper at the end of life.
Challenges: Only reprocessed in certain markets. Can rot if not collected and reprocessed in a timely manner.

Aluminum
Advantages: Easy to recycle and has fairly brisk recycling markets in many areas of the world. Very strong material.
Challenges: Virgin aluminum is extremely energy-intensive. The mining and production of virgin aluminum has heavy impacts on habitats, particularly aquatic systems. Ultimately, it rusts and breaks down. While recycling does save considerable energy, the cans are not refillable.

Single-Serving Glass Bottle
Advantages: Highly recyclable. Strong markets for glass recycling in many regions of the country. Efficient use of materials.
Challenges: Heavier than many plastics and often not seen as desirable for long-distance transport of beverages. Doesn't biodegrade.

Refillable Glass Bottle
Advantages: Highly reusable. Ultimately recyclable. Works on a refill deposit system.
Challenges: Heavy weight limits the glass bottle to short-distance transport and therefore favors local food producers. Requires producer and consumer commitment or strict legislation.

The War on Xmas Continues!!!

Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign.

There's another variant of this story from a few years ago, when a man was arrested for wearing a "Give Peace a Chance"/"Peace on Earth" t-shirt in an Albany, NY shopping mall. That story was slightly different -- he'd actually bought the offending shirt at the mall, and his son (who was also arrested) was wearing a slightly more contentious t-shirt, which said "Let Inspections Work" and "No War With Iraq."

I can remember that first wave of mainstream '60s revivalism, in the late '80s. Tie-dyed peace sign shirts were EVERYWHERE, from little kids to soccer dads to dancers in music videos to sitcom characters. And nobody questioned it, nobody called it Satanic (that was what heavy metal was for), it was just this nice universalist thing in our progressive United Colors of Benneton world that was ready to Rock The Vote for Bill Clinton. What a strange blip of history that was.

Two Items

1) I saw an odd MTA house ad on the bus today. It was pimping its website's intermittently useful Trip Planner. Nothing odd about that, but the sample destination address the ad showed was "Fairfax/La Brea." I know they don't mean to imply that Fairfax and La Brea intersect, seeing how the two avenues are both north/south (and don't have a little arc intersecting them the way Glendale Blvd/Silver Lake Blvd do) and are separated by at least ten smaller streets at any given longitude (rough estimate: I spent 5 seconds looking at GoogleMaps).

I'm still new here, so forgive me, but if "Fairfax/La Brea" is one of those cutesy real-estate neighborhood designations I haven't heard it yet -- but it could just be a lazy conflation of the Fairfax District and Park La Brea.

I just typed "Fairfax/La Brea" into the Trip Planner with Union Station as the starting address, with a departure time of Sunday at 10:00 AM. It recognized Union Station and for the former it came up with "NO LOCATION" and this message: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'brea-ycoord) AS subdwalk, hdsgn1 AS dhs, MIN(freqx) AS dfr.

2) I'm doing the AIDS Walk next Sunday, in and around West Hollywood. Here's my donation page -- the proceeds go to AIDS Project Los Angeles and other HIV/AIDS nonprofits. (The walk's 6.2 miles, and yes, we cross both Fairfax and La Brea Avenues -- on foot, so who needs that stinky Trip Planner anyway?)

On a more serious note, HIV/AIDS is still a real crisis in this country (and in the larger world), despite the deafening silence on the issue from career politicians and the mainstream media. It's great that events like the AIDS Walk(s) do their share in keeping the epidemic in the spotlight, albeit for short bursts of time. I wish more could be done (I wish we could wipe the whole f-in' thing out; I also wish I could go back in time and prevent Ronald Reagan from being born), but the total monies raised by this walk will go a very long way indeed -- toward research, education, treatment, counseling, advocacy, and fulfilling such basic needs as groceries for HIV-infected people and their families. Please donate a few dollars if you can. (That link again.)

My contribution to the 9/11 literature

I wrote the following on September 12, 2002.

I might as well share some thoughts on 9/11.

Yesterday I watched a few TV things here and there, but I wasn't that interested in hearing the same "national tragedy" spiel ad nauseam. It numbs the mind after a while. And to be honest, I remember 9/11/01 well enough a year later -- I haven't lost any of the bitterness or confusion or sadness.

The morning of 9/11, I was awakened by the clock radio, and the DJ was introducing a new Bob Dylan song called "Summer Days." I thought "What a cool thing to wake up to. What a wonderful song" -- and I hoped it would set the tone for the rest of the day. Next thing I knew, the DJ was saying "Turn on the news when you get the chance; apparently a plane has hit one of the Twin Towers."

I was on my way to a class, but when I left the house I wandered in the opposite direction of the subway, down to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where I could see an unobstructed view of the burning tower across the river. A huge group of people had already assembled down there -- they weren't emotional at that point, they just wanted to see what was going on. I stuck around for a few minutes, and walked to the subway.

I was able to get down to the Court Street N/R platform with no problems, but I knew something was wrong once I'd been waiting for my train for 20 minutes. Soon, all the subways were out of service. No way I was gonna make that class, so I headed back to the Promenade to see what was happening. The smoke was getting thicker, and blowing into the air on an 11 o'clock angle. Went home and turned on the news.

I had left the room for a second, and while I was in the other room I heard a loud, startling thud outside. New York cable news station NY1 had live coverage of the first attack, and as I ran into my bedroom I was able to see the second tower being hit.

Back on the Promenade, people were gathering, taking pictures (which I thought was tasteless), staring in disbelief, screaming "Holy shit!!!" -- but despite the vision of two skyscrapers on fire, things were still considerably under control on our end. Until... the towers began to collapse and the debris started flying.

The smell was AWFUL, like the most grand mal, grotesque barbecue you could imagine -- an inescapable odor of smoke, gas, and burning flesh. People were running for their lives, covering their faces with their hands, trying to keep the smoke and debris out of their eyes. The air was a greyish white. It was impossible to see anything, and my clothes and hair became covered in debris (my guess: reams upon reams of paper, some detritus from the structure of the buildings, some soot, and maybe some fibers of burned clothing). I went home, and I didn't go back out until the afternoon, when the buildings had completely collapsed, and the smoke was contained on Manhattan Island and the skies above it.

The smoke didn't clear until days later -- but on the afternoon of 9/11, it was so thick that it covered the entirety of lower Manhattan and much of midtown. That afternoon, I just sat out on the Promenade, watching the smoke clear in real time, treating the act as a meditative exercise. By the time evening rolled around, I could actually sort of see the negative space that once contained the towers, with the smoke clinging to the buildings' angles like phantoms.

The days following were awful. I was terrified of everything; I didn't wanna take the subway for fear of a suicide bomber; I kept looking out the window of my midtown classroom, wondering when the Empire State Building (two blocks away) would come toppling down on us. Like everyone else, I watched the news constantly, but there was no hard news, only expressions of shock and replays of the two planes crashing into the towers.

It was an emotional time for me, because of the WTC, because of other things I was dealing with (and I still look at 9/11 as kind of an outrageously melodramatic metaphor for the shitty year I was having... when I put it all in context, I was like "well, THAT fuckin' figures"). So it's tough for me to relive all that stuff now, in 2002.

I did go down to Ground Zero yesterday. It was the first time I'd gone to the disaster site; I'd just never felt the need to go, to gawk and rubberneck and congregate with all the picture-snappers and t-shirt buyers. Not my style -- I decided I'd rather mourn with my memory than with my eyes.

Yeah, so I went down there, and it was all blocked off by police barriers (the president was down there, so security was kicked into the highest gear). Crowds were kept at bay and made to stand several blocks from the site.

I didn't stick around; I made it down to the river and walked north along Greenwich St., checking out the historic buildings and warehouses in the area, feeling lucky to be a New Yorker, in such close proximity to some of the world's most beautiful architecture, landmarks protected from ravenous developers and pretty much guaranteed NOT to be a target for terrorists. As I came up behind Borough of Manhattan Community College, I discovered a whole row of perfectly preserved Federal-style houses from the 19th century, tucked away on Harrison St., hiding in a tiny cranny of the more modern, utilitarian surroundings of the college.

It must sound corny to out-of-towners, but these are the things that make New Yorkers passionate about their city. I began the day feeling a little down. I don't usually drink in the morning, but I dreaded the day and figured I'd polish off the wine I'd bought the previous evening (a 2000 Rabbit Ridge Merlot -- very yummy and perfect for a drinking binge). By noon I was feeling okay and I went out for a really satisfying pasta lunch at a local Italian place.

If that's what the pundits mean by "defiance" -- enjoying good food and wine and other aesthetic pleasures on a day associated with terror and victimization -- I'm in. I think I'll make this a tradition.