So Many Recycling Things #03

 Some World Recycling Projects #3

Summary and wrap-up

This is fairly self-explanatory, I noticed a few things as I watched the videos, took notes, then rewatched segments until I had all the info I wanted, and then tried to compose my thoughts about them. As such this is highly subjective and reflects only my own views.

I look at all these episodes with an eye to my project which is to give people the means to do basic recycling with simple inexpensive equipment and techniques. The hope is that people will get the recycling bug, form local community recycling hubs, and then involve and educate their community.

To see all the articles I write, head for the footnotes. 

Summary

There were a few cons - as in conniving, 'con-artist' and not contra - in the series. I counted about half a dozen of those, and suggest we make the best of those by using them to disseminate information about sustainability, cradle to cradle circular materials management, and recovery.

Several more were well-intentioned but poorly executed and/or generated almost as many problems as they solved.

Rather a lot of the enterprises were hampered because no corporation or government wants to chip in and help grow them, and sometimes that's just general inertia but sometimes it's because to admit there was a problem would also mean having people make the connection that that particular governmet or corporation is responsible for the issue being recycled, and they are the kinds of eco-disasters that come with lawsuits and class actions attached...

There are as I've mentioned a range of technologies now being developed and available for managing heating and energy in sustainable ways. Our task is to balance these in ways that do the least damage to the planet and restore as much as possible of it. But to keep in mind that proper and specifically targeted application of energy is a solution to many of the issues developed in these three articles. 

Being Earthlings and Stewards of the planet

Using the term 'family' in taxonomy (as in referring to 'the algae family' earlier on) should tell us something - we're not humans and apes and monkeys and fungii and lichens and trees etc - we're EARTHLINGS and we need to start thinking about ourselves in that light - pretty much right now.

If we'd never lost that sense of stewardship due to 'convenience' and economy, our planet and our extended family would never have gotten into the state it's in now. Economising on our efforts (i.e. 'convenience' ) made survival sense in the past but no longer does. There's no longer a survival rationale to our old behaviours, we have enough to easily survive. 

We need to have less 'convenience' and pay far more for what convenience we do have. But see this next paragraph or two.

UBI (Universal Basic Income)

Maintaining 'wealth' was a good survival buffer but again it makes no sense in the current era. Keeping that wealth from 'subclasses' may have made sense when masses of rapidly breeding people had no access to education and had to be controlled, but in this day and age, education (which IS now available thanks to online video and lessons and freely available) should now be available to all.

(IDEA: Maybe instead of that much-vaunted 'social credit' or 'carbon credit' as a world currency should be also include 'education credit'  and be capped at some sensible level.)

The point is that if we shared things the least bit equitably, almost everyone on the planet could live well enough. The 'Middle Class' deomgraphic that came about last century and the century before, are now only one step up the wealth ladder from homeless refugees and in fact a few of the middle class will also become climate refugees in a really short time frame. 

As far as that goes a UBI could become a given in under a month- as long as everyone got one. Including people right at the top, the 1% of the 1% that own 80% of the wealth of the planet. You can see where the problem is going to lie, can't you? 

So-called "eating the rich" doesn't mean cannibalisation. It means persuading or legislating those with the wealth to redistribute it. There's a growing trend among billionaires to give most of their wealth away, and this is a good thing and a bad thing. 

Footnote:

In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

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