50 Simple Things You can Do to Save Earth

I found a book today. Apparently it’s a book I own because it was in my house, but I have no idea how it came to rest in the basket of children’s board books beneath my coffee table. But then, there are lots of things moving mysteriously around my house these days. Thanks to my one-year-old daughter, the TV remote is in the fridge and the yogurt is under my bed. So it is possible, I suppose, that she picked up this book from, like, a box in the attic and brought it downstairs and put it in this basket full of other books. Although, such straightforward classification of an object would be somewhat out of character for her.
The book is called “50 Simple Things You can Do to Save Earth.” It caught my eye because I very much enjoy (some might argue am only capable of) doing simple things, and it has long been my life’s ambition to save the earth (But usually in my fantasy I have an impressive combination of super powers that enable me to do this. Or I am a transformer).
However, when I opened the book and saw that it was older than dirt, I experienced disappointment. It was published in 1989 by the Earthworks Press (Berkeley, CA). This, I realized, was a list of things people could have done to save the earth back when computers stored data on cassette tapes and telephones were large and attached to the wall by squiggly cords. It was obsolete. A waste of time. What could such a book have to offer to us future-living folk?
Funny I should ask, because while yes there are a few obviously dated suggestions (snip your six pack rings, don’t use leaded gas), there are many that make me wonder just a little bit what the hell you grown-ups have been doing for the past two decades.
Like for example, the very first page of this book breaks down the greenhouse effect and explains the importance of carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons and methane and ozone. Here is a little quote: “For the first time in history, human activities are altering the climate of our entire planet.” Umm, hello? This was written back when Bon Jovi was popular. The first time. Robin Yount was playing outfield for the Milwaukee Brewers. Hawaii wasn’t even a state yet. It was the Sandwich Islands. You got there by steamer. Mark Twain was filing humorous dispatches about hula dancers.
Anyway, “50 Simple Things You can Do to Save Earth.” goes on to outline the problems of earth circa 1989 – air pollution, ozone depletion, acid rain, vanishing wildlife, groundwater pollution, inadequate citizen input into local planning decisions (Ha! Just kidding about the last one. Nobody ever cared about that). And because you didn’t seem to be paying attention way back when, here are a few of its suggestions:
- Stop Junk Mail (the average American, in 1989, spent 8 months of his life opening it). If a million people stopped their junk mail, 1.5 million trees would be saved per year (and 999,989 people would have no reason to check their mail boxes each day).
- Use a clean detergent, one that doesn’t have phosphates – they cause algae blooms, which aren’t pretty, smell-good “blooms” like the ones on your Mr. Lincoln roses. They stink. They kill fish. They bad.
- Set your water heater to 130 degrees – hot enough to kill Legionnaire’s Disease, cool enough to save the planet.
- Buy efficient appliances – stop wasting gas, electricity and water you lazy bums.
- Replace (get this!) incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs (a suggestion from 1989? Really? Really? Really? Al Gore? Really?)

Boy, what a helpful list of suggestions. It’s a good thing we made all of these changes back before things got really bad. Thanks a lot baby boomers. Do you feel that? It’s called guilt. Or maybe it’s regret. Or maybe it’s that special irritation you get just before you crumple up a pain-in-the-neck newspaper column. Wait! Wait! Recycle it.

Yearbook

For those of you who have chosen professions that do not require daily interaction with thirteen-year-olds, the yearbooks have arrived. They are currently being passed and signed. In code. With indecipherable acronyms. What do they mean? It is best that we don’t know.
The yearbook is a frightening and dangerous thing. Did you know this? It may seem to be nothing more than a happy collection of passport photos spiced with candid shots of the walk-a-thon, the spring musical, the volleyball team in action against Northview, and microscope labs. But don’t be fooled. The middle school yearbook is far from innocuous. It is concrete, published and distributed, evidence of how little we matter. If there were any doubts about a person’s status in the middle school social hierarchy, the arrival of the yearbook, and the (actual, literal) self-examination that follows, makes it crystal clear that most of us are fleas on the stray dog that is about to be euthanized at the humane society of the middle school campus world. Dorks.
You must have done this back when your own yearbooks arrived in your first period class or your “homeroom” or wherever. You looked through every single page of the new yearbook, searching for pictures of yourself. Admit it, you scoured the thing. Of course, there was the one picture you could always count on (unless you were absent on picture day and make-up picture day. What is with that? Did you have mono or something?) That would be the alphabetized one next to the girl you had been standing in line behind since kindergarten. But you were looking for other pictures, pictures that showed you standing in the world with people who may have even looked like friends. You probably made a list, an index, of all of the pages on which you could be found. Maybe you even shared this list with your peers as you signed their yearbooks. “See me on pages 6, 14, 82, 112 and 114. KIT. Let’s party this summer! Call Me! BFFFFFF”
Did you really appear on all of those pages? I hate you. We all do. Those of us who weren’t in the yearbook class with you, I mean. The ones you teased when you came in and took our pictures while we had our social studies textbooks open on our desks, or while we were standing in line to buy powdery white donettes at snack time. You made us think that we had a prayer of showing up in the Illustrated Who’s Who of Middle School. But we never really did. Did we? There wasn’t even film in the camera. Whatever.
Am I coming across as bitter or resentful or damaged? Sorry about that. I’m OK, now. Really I am. The electroshock therapy is really starting to stick. Seems like it anyway… this time around. It’s because when I was a 7th grader, I spent four hours pouring through my own yearbook, seeking any evidence of my existence. Foreground, background, anyground. I was looking through photographed windows, at reflections and shadows, trying to figure out, with the help of context clues (sun position, other people in the picture, type of activity being undertaken) if I was anywhere to be found on that campus.
Eventually, I was able to find a picture that showed two people running in P.E. clothes. These were people that I know for sure (probably, I think) I may have run next to in P.E. at some point during the school year. And, if you look to the left of them, just at the edge of the frame there is an elbow. It is a goofy looking elbow with freckles. It looks insecure. I think it’s mine.
I wish that as a 7th grader I would have had it in me to find this funny. I wish I could have made it in to a joke. I could have gone around signing everyone else’s yearbooks right on top of that picture, drawing arrows pointing at my elbow and talking loudly during class (but in a way that my teachers found charming and disarming.) All of the girls would have been impressed. But I wasn’t that kind of 7th grader, was I? If I had been, you can bet there would have been more than just a picture of my elbow in the yearbook.

Who’s Confused?

When, at the end of May, President George W. Bush read a speech on Global Warming, out loud and (basically) in public at the United States Agency for International Development, one of us (he or I) was very very confused.
George W. is the same president who, in a 2001 press conference expounded on the “global dimming” benefits of sulfur particles in the atmosphere (which is silly, right?). Under him, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant, and that its emission from automobiles can’t even be regulated (the Supreme Court disagreed recently). And, here he was, in this new speech, doing his best Al Gore impersonation.
At first, I was convinced that George W. was the confused one. I thought that he must have misheard one of his “staffers” or misread an important memorandum somewhere. Or maybe there was, like, a series of Pink Panther-esque blunders including, possibly, switched briefcases, lost notes, earwax, typos, and functional illiteracy which resulted in George W. making an impassioned speech on what he thought was the dangers of not stirring the chicken soup (Globular Swarming) or on the product recall of an especially dangerous glow-in-the-dark high bouncy ball (Glow Ball Warning). Because, I knew for sure for sure that if there was one person on this planet I could count on to NOT call for global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (other than that guy who wrote in to the paper two weeks ago) it was president George W. Bush.
Apparently I was the one who was confused. For, that is just exactly what he did. He called for the top dozen (or so) greenhouse gas emitting countries to take part in a series of talks to set a “long-term global goal” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But don’t get too excited about the environmentalist green superhero tights George W. has been hiding beneath his free market Texas business suit (with pointy boots and a large belt buckle) these past six years. The goals in his plan would be “aspirational” and would not be binding unless individual nations chose to “bind themselves,” according to James L. Connaughton, the president’s environmental advisor.
Not surprisingly, George W.’s call to action has been met with a certain degree of, shall we say, skepticism. Especially in parts of the planet where people have actually been worrying about this issue and taking action… places where government officials signed this little thing called the Kyoto Treaty (which President Bush refused to sign in 2001, claiming that it would hurt the US economy and that it wasn’t fair because it didn’t include China and India), places which (thanks to mandatory reductions and carbon trading) have reduced greenhouse gas emissions over the past fifteen years as U.S. emissions have risen 16 percent.
My favorite response to George W.’s proposal came from German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. She also holds the presidency of the European Union and has proposed that greenhouse gas emissions there be reduced by 50 percent by 2050. She is pressing the group of 8 industrialized nations (the famous G-8… the U.S. is one of them), which will be meeting this week on the Baltic Sea, to adopt such a plan as well. The U.S. has rejected her proposal, which makes sense because now that we have our own separate set of aspirational meetings, we’ll be too busy to worry about any truly binding G-8 climate proposals, or for that matter, the second phase of the Kyoto talks, which will begin in Bali later this year.
But anyway, Chancellor Merkel, speaking to reporters in Berlin, said, “What is positive is that we can see from the speech that the president made… that nobody can ignore the question of climate change.” Although, maybe a little bit of ignoring wouldn’t be so bad in this case. A redundant, irrelevant plan, the sole purpose of which seems to be to derail other legitimate efforts that have been going on for years is not exactly the kind of attention Global Warming is looking for… unless I am still just really confused.

Sports Injury Diagnosis

One thing I appreciate about my doctor (other than his ability to prescribe high-powered pain medication when my cornea is scratched by stupid pieces of cheap pressboard that fly directly under the safety goggles I swear I was wearing while I operated that circular saw) is his sense of dramatic timing. This is a man who knows how to deliver news. No hemming and hawing, no sidestepping or tiptoeing around from him.
He just holds up my X-ray and says, “hmph.” Then he sits there all comfortable and relaxed (well, as comfortable and relaxed as a person can be on a 2 foot tall rolling stool) for about three and a half years while I, in my underwear, seated on crinkly paper, am left to imagine all of the possible meanings of that one little vocalization. It’s not even a word. Does it mean, “Here is a pathetic reason for a person to make a doctor appointment… even if he does have a laughably low pain threshold?” Or, “Now that’s something I’ve never seen before?” Or, “Oh lordy, where’s my bone saw?”
Then my doctor looks me in the eye (straight down into the depths of my soul – I cringe) and tells me, “There’s a fracture all right.”
This is not the news I came to hear. There is not supposed to be a fracture. A fracture is the worst possible outcome. And not because of casts or crutches or anything like that. A fracture means that my wife is right. I should not have waited a week to see the doctor. It means that I definitely should not have hobbled around the mall yesterday, or around work the two days before. A fracture means that her shocked look was justified. That I deserve her charitable sympathy. That I am, as she put it when I was lying on the couch with ice on my ankle as it swelled to elephantine proportions and turned the beautiful deep purple of a Maui sunset, “so broken.” It means that playing soccer on Thursday nights with the other slightly chunky 30 plus has-beens and never-wases is, in fact, a dumb idea, and that I need to resign myself to a sensible form of exercise. Lap swimming. Exercycling. Eating corn chips in front of the TV. That’s what it means.
But wait. Here comes my clever doctor with My Dramatic Sports Injury Diagnosis Part II. “However,” he says, “it’s not the fracture I am most worried about.”
Ahh! What? What? What are you most worried about?! What is worse than my broken foot? Cancer of the ankle? Consumption? Bird Flu? Ebola? How can you even tell by looking at an X-ray image? Tell me the bad news, Doctor!
OK, um… so the bad news turned out to be the sprain. And it turned out that (strangely) the fracture didn’t even really count as news at all. It was just the warm-up portion of the doctor patient shtick we were performing.
My fractured bone is apparently an extra one that some people are born with and other people aren’t. I think it’s floating around somewhere by my Achilles tendon. Broken. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares because it bears no weight. Its only purpose is to help make a doctor sound smart when he tells his patient what it is called. Something with many syllables, maybe starting with a “g”? I asked my doctor to repeat it four times and I still wasn’t able to get it properly stored in my brain. This was bothering me a lot (I even did some lackluster internet research) until I remembered that I can only name like 12 bones of my skeleton anyway. Why should I worry about this little one nobody else has?

The real bad news was that I had/ have an ankle sprain, a “grade two” or “grade three,” he told me. Which means that when I landed all gracefully and athletically (stupidly and doofusly) my ankle experienced “significant tearing of the ligaments,” making the joint “very loose or unstable” (according to my stapled info sheet).
My doctor presented me with a piece of stretchy plastic bag and a sheet with various ankle exercises that I have been diligently carrying out. My three year-old daughter is copying them and creating some of her own. She pushes against walls and lies on her back with her feet straight up in the air. “Look, Dad, I’m doing my exercises.” She now skips the Strawberry Shortcake Band Aids and heads for the couch to elevate her boo boos.
So anyway, I am not “so broken” thank you very much, beautiful kind wife. I am merely “completely torn” and “very loose and unstable.” Hmph.