Two interesting articles back to back from the July 2009 issue of Harper's: "Barrack Hoover Obama" and "Labors Last Stand"

It's strange but true: Barrack Obama and Herbert Hoover bear important similarities especially with regard to their abilities vis-a-vis the economic situations of their respective times. Even though Hoover was regarded as the most competent man for the job of president at the beginning of what came to be known as the Great Depression, he failed to stop it from deepening. Will Obama, widely regarded as one of the most capable leaders in the face of the depression we face now, also fail and do so for reasons much like those responsible for Hoover's failure? Two articles in the July 2009 issue of Harper's outline how and why he could fail and offer ways in which he might avoid mistakes like Hoover's. 

Chilling fiction and non-fiction to combat the summer heat

There are several books that I've enjoyed reading over the past few years, particularly in the summer. I've written an "overview" review of all of them here. I hope to write a separate review of each of them over the coming weeks. Please watch this space.

Reusing bags and the "durable" future

Starting today, shoppers at Target stores in Australia will no longer have the option to take their merchandise away in plastic bags. Will something similar happen in North American Targets? I hope so. This issue is indirectly related to advocacy for human-sized environments and directly related to the phrase in the title I stole from Bill McKibben.

I might shop in Target once a month, so I don't have too many Target bags crammed in some drawer in the kitchen, but I do shop quite a bit at Publix. I've just recently started riding my bike to shop instead of driving. I had been taking my stuff home in paper bags, but now have started using the reusable shopping bags they offer. The reusable bags are great because they fit neatly into the basket I have attached to the front of my bike. I had taken paper bags because we use them for garbage bags in the kitchen -- just like it seemed that everyone did in the old days. So perhaps I'll request the odd paper bag every few days just to have one at the ready.

It's obvious why a proliferation of plastic bags are of importance to the durable future. Such bags might not make as much of an environmental impact if they were all gathered and recycled, but judging by how many stray bags I see stuck in tree branches around town, I don't think recycling is the end most of these bags meet. Too many probably end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, if the wikipedia is to be believed on this issue. Whether any of North American Targets' bags make to an eternal life of not-quite-floating and not-quite-sinking in the North Pacific, it seems certain that quite a few make it into landfills, gullies by the side of the road and, yes, high in tree branches. It seems bad to introduce so many bags into the waste stream, but there are other options. I've heard that plastic bags are easier to recycle than paper bags and the process requires less energy, but I think Target has made a wise move (in Australia anyway) by eliminating plastic bags altogether.

As far as matter is concerned, planet Earth is a closed system. The amount of oil used to make plastic bags come from somewhere. If it's used to make a plastic bag then it can't be used for something else in the future. If we could get by without using plastic bags at all, wouldn't that be a better course to take for the long term? We see this nature of finite resources if we focus on human-sized environments. There are obviously only a finite number of trees in your neighborhood; possibly only enough to be counted quickly. If one is accustomed to living in a human-sized environment, and an human-sized environment is one's default frame of reference for thinking about resources and how to use them, moving away from the use of disposable packaging made from non-renewable raw materials is immediately obvious.

Not only do we want to be able to put things we've bought in a bag of some sort or other, we want to be able to do it for the foreseeable future. (If we want consumption to be sustainable, I'm uncertain we'll be shopping the way we do typically at Target. We'll probably have to buy less and not in the way many of us do now.) If sustainability is to be a priority, I suggest that we consumers treat our environments (no matter how vast they are) as if they were human-sized, and try to leave them cleaner than they were when we arrived.