Looking for Spring

No school today. Our building didn't have heat. What rotten luck -- another rehearsal vanishes from the diminishing schedule.




Rather than stress about it, I decided to head off into the cold sunshine -- with faithful Oberon the huskador retriever at my side -- to see if I could find some signs of spring.

When I was a kid, I had my own spring ritual. There would come a day in March when the snows were receding and the sky looked blue enough with sun poking through NE Ohio clouds, that lured me out in search of harbingers. I had my own secret place, in the wilds of Granger township that I visited every year, a wooded dell beside Granger lake beyond the cow pasture with no houses in sight. There I looked for trillium, bloodroot, and jack in the pulpit.

That old cow pasture is now full of McMansions, while the lake is surrounded by condominiums, and I doubt my favorite wild flowers reside there these days. But the sky above Akron had that look today, so we went for a long walk along the west shoreline of Summit Lake. Above you can see the waterfowl skirting the ice, our one resident blue heron is a long-necked speck in the upper right corner. Our first sign of spring!

Last year's vegetation, like an old grass skirt, edged the lake, providing a camouflage for ugliness on view once we got to the shoreline itself. There the hideous sights revealed themselves -- plastics on parade:














All manner of plastic refuse bobbed against the shore: plastic cups, packaging, food containers, and bags proudly displaying their various brands of consumables from diapers to cheap white bread.
















I duly photographed as many items as I could before my hands grew numb with the cold. No bit of shoreline was left unmarked by human consumerism. We found a traffic cone, a plastic garbage bin, milk jugs, a tricycle, and various tires:

It was all too depressing. We had to watch our step along the grassy edge of the lake, as many people walk their dogs there, but don't bother to pick up the poop and dispose of it properly. What would it take to have a couple of Doggie Dooleys installed along the lake, I wondered to myself? And maybe even some public trash cans would help motivate the humans who visit here to dispose of their trash in places other than the lake.

Upon arrival home, I looked about for some more positive signs of spring. Brushing aside a winter coat of dried leaves, I found the following green bits working their way toward spring.

March 21st cannot get here fast enough for me!

The Story of Stuff

Here's my nomination for Best Film of 2007. The Story of Stuff walks you through the entire process of how stuff is produced, transported, bought, sold and where it goes when it is no longer wanted. You can watch it chapter by chapter here or go to Free Range Studios to watch it in its entirety.

Chapter 1: Introduction



Chapter 2: Extraction




Chapter 3: Production



Chapter 4: Distribution



Chapter 5: Consumption



Chapter 6 -- Disposal



Chapter 7: Another Way

China bans plastic bags -- when will we?

China's landfills are bursting at the seams and will be filled to capacity in 13 years, so their government has decided to ban plastic shopping bags, at least the flimsy plastic ones that blow everywhere and end up in trees. The Chinese are also trying to clean up their image before the Olympics, according to an AP story today.

Deep within the story, these facts caught my eye:

"In the United States, which has less than one-quarter of China's 1.3 billion people, the Sierra Club's Sierra magazine estimates almost 100 billion plastic bags are thrown out each year. The Sierra Club estimated that if every one of New York City's 8 million people used one less grocery bag per year, it would reduce waste by about 218,000 pounds."

Here in convenience-driven U$A, the citizens mindlessly wait for anything they purchase to be placed in a plastic bag which they may take home to eventually find its way to a landfill or allow to fly out the car window and escape to pollute and kill wildlife.

The Chinese until quite recently shopped with cloth bags and baskets. But the arrival of big box stores also brought the ubiquitous and deadly plastic bag. The Chinese went from a sustainable form of shopping to that of the robotic western consumerist style of wrap everything in plastic.

Using cloth shopping bags is one simple action that anybody can do. Take a stand against mindless consumption and switch to cloth bags.

The image above of the turtle attempting to ingest a plastic bag is lifted from this site in Australia. Try Googling for images of plastic bags in trees for and you will find gruesome images of dead animals remains filled with undigested plastic bags.