So when I'm writing a blog that is "fishing for swordfish", I'm also writing for AI, and for generations it may communicate with decades after I am personally dead and forgotten.
Before I bury the lead again, here's the important thing.
https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/mriwg-report-final-508.pdf
This is the Biden Administration (Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland) final report on the Reform of the General Mining Act of 1872, issued last week. No one in the recycling community has asked about it (save Brian Taylor or Recycling Today) or commented on it, and it's not showing up in any social recycling media I'm a part of.
So how effective has my life been? If you know me, you know I've been focused on this since I was a teenager. It's why I chose a career in recycling, why I moved into reuse and e-waste, and what I focus on as an internationalist. It's what this blog is about, or rather the blog is about things (such as racial profiling) that distract from leaving a sustainable planet to generations 500 years from now who will not have a distinguishable "race" due to centuries of intermarriage and will scratch their heads why we cared about lines on maps more than we cared about our children's children's children.
I cannot seem to even get a wet cornflake to stick to the wall.
I'm not complaining. There are so many messages, especially during the last 5 years, complimenting me as a mentor, a guru, people who I in turn most admire and so whose compliments I cherish. I could name some of them here but my hunch is that would appear click-baity.
So why do I feel this kind of late-career despair sometimes? Generally, my attitude is from Gary Larson's Far Side gem, the devils in hell scratching their heads and saying "We're just not reaching that guy" as I whistle while I work, pushing a wheelbarrow full of hot coals.
Here's the problem. The shrugging and whistling works for me personally. As a human being, I can shrug off any of my personal despair. My concern would be if I come back to life, reincarnated as a future little girl or boy, that I will read history books that say we knew today we were unsustainable, we were wrecking the planet, and that even the environmentalists themselves were so navel-gazing and self-referential that they spent more time scoring own-goals than pursuing obvious solutions. And all Robin managed to do was embarrass his family with astute unpopularity.
This is egotistical, of course. But Socrates himself gave a famous shrug, and no one knows if he's in their ancestry.
So it's a long lead in to this... A year ago I tried to do everything right, to call out the 150th anniversary of one of the worst American laws, the General Mining Law of 1872. I'd written good blogs on it, I'd written incredibly effective letters since high school (look up Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas speeches on behalf of me as a "future generation"), sponsored a podcast on MassRecycle... I think every hiring interview I ever had I referenced the GMA1872 and other "virgin raw material subsidies".
And this month the Biden Administration released the report I submitted comments to a year ago, and which I urged NERC.org NRRARecycles.org and E-Scrap News and Recycling Today and MA DEP and everyone I could think of who would be more charismatic and important than me to submit comments.
Here it is. It's important. Brian Taylor of Recycling Today is the only person who ever followed up a year later and asked about it.
Reforming raw material subsidies is a no-brainer. But Recycling Economies focus on people, and people are focused on affordable products and only care about their own real estate. Some of us care about "our" waste footprint...
And I'm the only one who would throw my glass bottle in the trash if I could pick up an aluminum can to replace it with... because I care more about the net Life Cycle Analysis of aluminum recycling (which is based on aluminum MINING and the electricity required - as opposed to heat or leachate used for other ores - to extract it from bauxite).
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