== You Cannot Save The Earth = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Does buying that cute recycled organic lip balm really do any good? Your government snickers

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/18/notes041807.DTL&nl=fix

It's the great painful bitch-slapping soul-stabbing environmental conundrum du jour:

Say you've been reading up and doing your eco-homework and watching the appropriate inconvenient documentaries and you finally get yourself a little excited to go green, and so you buy your compact fluorescents and turn off all your power strips at night and recycle and reuse and compost and go organic and local and grass-fed and everything's just orgasmically sustainably delicious.

And maybe all this good eco-vibration spurs you on even further, and you decide to green up the whole house, get into gray water and solar and reclaimed wood and non-VOC paints and all the rest, and fill the joint with organic cotton sheets and chem-free cleansers and passive heating systems and non-phthalates dildos and you sit back in your ethically farmed chair and sigh and say, Well, there ya go, did what I could, the world is a better place, maybe just a tiny bit -- I mean, isn't it?

And then it happens. You decide to take a break, take a load off, and maybe you go for nice drive in the hybrid or out in the Mini, just to get out, see the sights, enjoy the sunshine before it gets too hot and burns up all the ice caps, and if you live anywhere near the Bay Area it's incredibly easy to split the dense urban environment and head out into the "real" California, to the burning gauzy central slab of the state that seems, when you drive down it, as large as Europe and as foreign as Pluto, and wham, oh my God, it feels as though you've driven into a massive pile of makeshift concrete manure. ...

Read the rest:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/18/notes041807.DTL&nl=fix

[bananas]

1. "But here's the story's big kicker: ..."

"I remember reading, years back, about McDonald's and the enviro movement's long-standing attacks on the junk-food titan's noxious use of those old Styrofoam burger containers. After years of screaming and protests, the eco-dudes finally realized it would be better to actually work with the toxic junk-food giant to help them figure out a way to employ recyclable cardboard boxes and still make a profit.

"It worked. McDonald's eventually dumped the Styrofoam. But here's the story's big kicker: Just that one simple shift, that one tiny change in corporate behavior affected an enormous industry all the way down the line, so much so that they figured it was the environmental equivalent of something like 50 million people deciding to recycle plastic bottles. It was at once staggering and humbling."

[madokie]

2. maybe I'm not remembering right but I remember way back when mcdonalds

wraped their burgers in yellow paper before the styrofoam, this was back before the chain had sold a million burgers. just thinking back.

[MADem]

4. Yes, they were around fifteen cents back then, eighteen for the cheeseburger.

Very few if any of them had indoor seating, and the heat came in the winter from space heaters mounted on the ceiling.

[Tesha]

5. Hamburgers in White, Cheeseburgers in Yellow.

(Surely I can't be THAT old!)

Tesha

[madokie]

6. we're seasoned

;-)

[Tesha]

7. Better than pickled, I guess. ;-) (NT)

[madokie]

8. In my case I think there was a little pickling in the sauce though

:rofl:

[Javaman]

10. Civilization ended with the introduction of the big mac. nt

[MADem]

3. And there are more "Next Big Things" to come.

The "Five Cents a Plastic Bag" at some supermarkets? The "bring your own canvas sack" business? That's been de rigeur in Europe for years. It'll gain more currency here as well. People will get in the habit of having their own sacks or string carriers (which actually hold more and don't cut your palm in two).

[Jcrowley]

9. K&R