EARTH DAY

Today is EARTH DAY.
I feel angered and too frustrated by local non-caring attitudes to be able to compose anything inspiring to myself or others. Our town authorities can't even be bothered to organise re-cycling facilities for newspapers and drinks cans. We have to drive a round trip of 70 miles to find somewhere to deposit our collections.

Whatever one's opinion on climate change/global warming - even if you think it's all "a hoax" as our Okie senator James Inhofe likes to declare at every available opportunity, wilful waste could still be addressed.

Before I blow a gasket, I'll give the post over to some people who put my feelings into words in ways far more eloquent than I can muster:

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923


And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess." ~Art Buchwald, 1970


"I really wonder what gives us the right to
wreck this poor planet of ours."
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.


Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. ~Ansel Adams


The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies. ~Al Gore

Finally, just yesterday Bolivian President Evo Morales said, in a speech reported here

"The capitalist system looks to obtain the maximum possible gain, promoting unlimited growth on a finite planet," said Morales. "Capitalism is the source of asymmetries and imbalance in the world."