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 the University of Arkansas in World Literature, during my teenage years, she would finish an assigned reading and then knock on my bedroom door, 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 Pentecostal 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.

Dell Global Recycling Video by Von Wong, Theory of God

While I would love to sit down with Von Wong and correct some of his statistics about ewaste (to put a more heroic face on the overseas Tech Sector, described as "landfills across the globe" in the intro), I have to hand it to him, the artwork is great.



Can't resist sharing this.  Thanks to my pal in Malaysia, Nancy Poh, for sharing it.

But this is a two part blog. The next is about my theory of knowledge, and knowledge of God.

Protein and Gold: Gore's Generation of Environmentalists Circuitous Path

"I believe in global warming"

"I don't believe in global warming"

These two statements seemed to starkly define a generation.  They become emblems of environmentalism, or environmental skepticism.   Many use one of these statements to define who they are.   The first is more popular, perhaps, because it's emblematic of compassion, and people dig compassion.

I believe extinction, the consumption of diverse species, is the simplest measure of our society's place in history of the planet.  Any other measure - carbon, or prayers, temperature, or wealth - is a distraction from what future people will care about that we did today.  What drives our impacts today?   Protein and Gold.

I dig baby elephants.  And I want baby elephants to have papas and mommies.  It's a simple faith in nurture, and it doesn't make me an environmental scientist.  But because I don't want elephants, or frogs, or tigers, walruses, or seals to be extinct, I work in recycling.  And it has nothing at all to do with landfills, or with carbon.   To save these species, we must alter our love of metals, especially expensive metals like gold.   And if you think teaching humans to consume less energy is challenging, try teaching people to let go of gold.

This is not a statement about the science of global warming.  It's a statement about human psychology, and the way media tries to educate society about need for change.  When we need society's consumption to change - and I'm convinced more than ever that we do - we need to understand our own psychology, our own cognitive dissonance, our own appetite for opinion change, and to invest in messages which opinion research indicates will make a darn difference one hundred to one thousand years from now.

For now, the loudest discussions, if not debate, are over global warming and climate change (thanks Mr. Gore).   There is no denying that there are many, many sophisticated arguments humans engage in to support either position at the top on belief in global warming.   There is also no denying that public discussion of the issue focuses primarily on the psychology and assessment of the opponent.

Merely referencing dry scholarly work on the shrinking (or not) of Mars poles, as an indicator of the average temperature on Mars, demands an apology.  From Yahoo answers discussion, links to these two papers are presented with a disclaimer... "I'm not a denier but evidence shows that they (Mars plar caps) are melting." 

http://sirius.bu.edu/withers/pppp/pdf/bo... 
http://depts.washington.edu/marsweb/pape... 

The discussion of global warming here on earth is usually hedged today with similar qualifiers.   "It's undeniable that even if the Earth is warming for other reasons (solar or celestial energy), that humans are producing more carbon, and carbon will exacerbate the rate of global warming."