My Four Principles: Recycling Is My Karma Yoga

This is not a religious blog by any means. But my recycling career choice has an origin story. 

When my mother, Janeth Ingenthron (1942-2025) was pursuing a Ph.D degree at University of Arkansas in World Literature, during my teenage years, she would finish an assigned reading and then knock on my bedroom door and throw it on my bed, and tell me briefly about why it was important.

Tao Tse Ching.

Plato's Republic. 

Steppenwolf, Siddhartha...

Bhagavad Gita...

Some combination of smoking pot and feeling guilty about it and being surrounded by Ozark Mountain Pentacostal relatives grew inside me... And I also read my pocket Gideon's Bible New Testament, and talked to Mom about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John... same story but different perspectives and lessons.

In a nutshell, cutting to the chase, I decided that becoming a hermit monk philosopher would keep my conscience nice and shiny, but that generations who would look back on us, the way I was looking back on these historical philophers, would care about what we consumed and polluted, and what we left for them.

That's why Recycling became my choice. It was a religious, philosophical choice. If I live on this planet, I will consume finite resources, and the best way short of asceticism was to justify my existence by saving waste. Recycling was my karma yoga.

Ten Years Since 2015: The Agbogbloshie Fever Broke

From 2015 to 2025, the story of e-waste exports has been more or less at an impasse. Academic peer reviewed research has supported this blog's thesis, which is that the e-waste filmed at Agbogbloshie city dump was domestically generated by the residents and businesses of the City of Accra. But sensationalists (like Alexander Clapp) still make money off of the easily told story of externalisation, in a world of Trump-Globalism-Is-Bad believers.

The role of journalism, and the role of the human amygdala ("if it bleeds, it leads") in selecting stories to report, is a frequent subject of the blog. I came from 3 generations of journalism on the Freeland (middle name) side of the family, my late father was a Journalism professor (fellow graduate of University of Missouri J-School, classmate of Jim Lehrer), and my long relationship with Emerging Markets (from the Nestle Boycott of 1982, which drew me into Carleton College Student Government to my International Relations degree and semester at the UN in Geneva, to Peace Corps and beyond) has frequently put me in a leadership position to call out false reporting about places like Agbogbloshie.

But it's also a challenge to keep this blog "fresh" and not to repeat myself. The Recycling Trade Press writ large eventually acknowledged it was participating in "poverty porn" for the sake of shredding equipment ad revenue and conference attendance (Editor Jerry Powell told me "it's not the steak, it's the sizzle" when - effectively - acknowledging to me privately that he realized Chinese recyclers were being racially profiled).

 https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2015/11/10/exporting-deception-disturbing-trend-waste-trade-denial/

E-Scrap News not only printed this in 2015, but RE-printed it in 2018, by which point the Basel Action Network's own staff was quitting and the fever should have broken.

This is why I simultaneously feel obligated to continue blogging, and at the same time want to give up. It's harder and harder for me to repeat things that are obvious, but the defense of racial profiling is not exactly something other than what we are all called upon to do.