Getting Involved, Benefits Of

 Warm Fuzzies

Of course there will always be a nice feeling when you're doing good deeds. Despite some of the more puzzlingly mean people in the world, we humans seem wired to do good. Good stewardship of the Earth counts as a very good thing, and I can speak from experience when I say that this project never fails to make me feel good. Consider the positive aspects:

A teaspoonful At A Time

I've had the benefit of once seeing a large open-cut mine from the top, and as I stood in the observation hut on top of what was left of a small mountain and looked down into the large gaping pit that was where the mining had cut down into the mountain, I saw these tiny little digging machines and trucks in there working away, and it reminded me of kids on a beach with teaspoons digging a hole.

(If you look at the lead photo of that news article you'll see a small white square halfway up and to the left a bit. That is an excavator and it's the size of a medium cottage and more than three stories tall. I know, I got to climb up inside and get a view of the rock face from the operator's seat. Now you can perhaps imagine the scale of that mine. . .)

Lesson:

- One person with one teaspoon makes a tiny difference, very slowly.

- Tens of thousands of people with tens of thousands of teaspoons can make a HUGE difference, quickly.

In the same way, it may seem that factories are spewing out plastics and short-lived gadgets and trinkets at a rate that'll overwhelm us, and the job of making good seems hopeless and we think that our little teaspoonful at a time won't stem the avalanche of waste.

But we have technology, we have tools. Thanks to the Internet we can see what's happening and it can't easily be hidden from us. We SEE the huge piles building up, we SEE other corporations pretending to to recycle while in fact just baling stuff and hiding in in warehouses. 

And once we become aware of it, we start working together to fix things.

 

This Kind Of Stuff Is Everywhere

How We Got Here

Around 300 years ago we started to apply what we'd learned about harnessing energy to do work for us, and only 260 years ago, the Industrial Revolution rolled in and swept away all the hand-to-mouth existence where every necessity of life had to be manually obtained, hand built and/or processed, and life wasn't always easy. (There are of course arguments that life was much easier "back in the good old days" but that's a matter of opinion. I can see the value to all the sides of this assertion but I think we're inestimably better off today.)

In that 260 years we grabbed for all the luxuries and conveniences that Industry made possible without giving too much thought to the less than desirable consequences. We had our eyes firmly fixed on how much easier life had become, how we could suddenly build better, live better, BE better. Apres moi le deluge as they say. 

But there are a few upsides to this scenario other than the obvious ones of the improved quality of life. 

How We Can Get From Here To A Better Situation

Imagine: A relatively small handful of people figured out how to harness steam reliably and how to put that power to work, and developed the methods and the products, and we poured our resources after the goal of this better life. There were barely one billion people on Earth, and a sizeable majority of them were in a state of what we'd now call Third World development, i.e. not really involved in the I.R. at all. So a relatively tiny number of people started this ball rolling.

Our population has increased exponentially. Our capacity for doing things has increased exponentially. The scale of the things we can do has increased exponentially. Our knowledge has increased exponentially. It's in fact so exponential that one of our leading futurists Mr. Ray Kurzweil has written that a "Singularity" is almost on top of us. 

That's the point (depending on how you want to define it) where a) Artificial Intelligence will become smarter than any human or b) where the sum of human knowledge increases at a rate where it becomes impossible to keep up with even any one limited field, or c) the point where a graph of technical progress becomes so close to a vertical line as to make no difference.

But importantly: Our capacity to recycle, to apply intelligent problem-solving, and our capacity for doing something about the waste issue has also increased exponentially. That means that whereas it took 200 years to get to the point where our waste increased to a point where it became noticeable, then only 60 years for it to become a planet-threatening disaster, we can count on it that we'll solve it within only two or three more years and start recycling our way out of danger.

The idea behind the recycling projects I'm spearheading is simple: 

We only need to take plastic (and other materials, yes, but plastic seems the most imminent catastrophe du jour) out of the waste stream for a few years before one of the professional plastics engineers comes up with a way of either recycling plastic more cheaply than it would cost to make new "virgin" plastic or else find ways to break plastic back down safely into its basic elements. 

And we know that someone will be thinking about it because I'm only one mind in eight billion thinking about it, but you can be sure that a hundred other people - a thousand other people, tens of thousands maybe - will also be thinking about it, and most of them will have more knowledge than I do. 

We know it, because energy is becoming cleaner and cheaper and will soon be effectively costless. And one of the tenets of breaking any complex material down into its components is that if you throw enough energy at it, it WILL break down. 

And I know it because now I've got YOU thinking about it, and between the two of us we'll make dozens of other people aware of it. Because if we between us start many small recycling projects then the public visibility of the efforts to recycle waste will rise, and even more people will be thinking about it, and many of them will start doing something about it at their location, too.

Because this is such a big issue and so close to all our best interests, we as a species, as Earthlings, will start putting our efforts to it. 

And That's How You Can Help

You've already helped.

If you'd like to get more involved, I have a list of things from actual recycling to research & development, publicity to starting local projects, to fundraising, purchasing, manufacturing machines,  organising, accounting, answering queries - there are dozens of things that anyone can do but I'm already too overcommitted or not knowledgeable about to do myself. 

If you'd like to see where else you can get involved, make a difference, be part of the birth of this as a worldwide community, try looking here: Call For People

Thanks for reading and (hopefully) going on to take part in this project.