Lift Up Your Hearts!

Sometimes I find the channel Future Proof to be helpful, sometimes not. This video (14 minutes) is good because it delves into the complexities behind the new trend that it's better to sell drinks in aluminum cans than in plastic bottles. Because aluminum is far more recyclable than plastic. Right?

Yes ... but. Whether we're talking electric vehicles, energy sources, double-paned windows, or portable drinks, there's always a but. In life, there are no silver bullets, no easy answers. I like this analysis because it goes beyond the container and considers what goes into making and using it.

Actually, there is somewhat of a silver bullet in this case. He's talking primarily about bottled (or canned) water, and drinking tap water is absolutely the most planet-saving bang for the buck around.

Don't get me wrong. I was thrilled when they started selling bottled water, because I don't care for soda, and that's all that used to be served at events like group picnics and public events. In order to quench my thirst I had to bring my own water—and in those days nobody had today's ubiquitous refillable water bottles. The first time I saw bottles of water available at a picnic I jumped for joy.

I even use plastic water bottles at home. We absolutely drink tap water when we can, but we also keep bottles of water in the closet in case a hurricane (or anything else) threatens our water supply. I reuse bottles when I can: Put tap water into plastic bottles, freeze them solid, and voilà—pack them in your cooler to keep your food and drinks cold. The packaging is light and fits neatly in the cooler; as they thaw, they provide cold water for drinking; and when they reach the end of their useful lives, they can then be conveniently disposed of (hopefully recycled), with fewer guilt feelings. It's a win-win. Yes, I am concerned about whatever nasty things might be leaching out of the plastic, but you can't worry about everything all the time. And did you know that aluminum cans are lined with plastic? I didn't, until I watched this video.

Aluminum cans may be mostly recyclable, but you can't re-use them.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the rallying cry for legalizing abortion in America was that the procedure should be safe, legal, and rare. Since that slogan appears to have been abandoned, maybe we could pick it up for plastic water bottles.

I love the Amish people. It was an Amish Supreme Court decision (Wisconsin v. Yoder) that became the backbone of home education today. Our family has deep personal ties to a court case that brought the Amish of Western Pennsylvania into downtown Pittsburgh to show their support in a situation that threatened their own way of life. The Amish are a very private people who just want to be left alone to live their traditional lives, but they will rise up and make themselves heard when their very existence is at stake. Several of our grandchildren were born in Amish Country. I'm not Amish, and I don't even know personally any Amish people, but I admire them greatly.

The following video is from Nick Johnson, about whom I know nothing else; it showed up as one of those YouTube suggestions after I watched something else. I found it delightful on many levels, from the scenery, to the simple, innocent, and very shrewd wisdom of the Amish people, to their solid values, to their delightful accents. (Did you know that their language is still understandable by modern-day speakers of Swiss German?) There's also an interview with Amos Miller, who is at the forefront of the fight for food freedom in Pennsylvania; we have some of his great meat in our freezer even now.

If you've ever met an Amish buggy on the road, you'll know how surprising this image is.

Traditionally, the Amish do not participate in civic matters. They do not vote. But this year, they see an opportunity to speak up for their way of life, the very existence of their farming and small business based culture, which is being crushed by heavy-handed governmental regulations that favor large corporations. They are voting this year, and in large numbers. For a look into a beautiful part of American culture that we rarely see, enjoy this 30-minute video.

Amos Miller is excited about the team that is gathering around Donald Trump.

They know the importance of farmers, they know the importance of food freedom, and I'm hoping that Trump will get that same perspective so we the farmers can do our duty that we've liked to do for many years. Farmers are going out of business like flies. We have lost probably 50% of our farmers within the last 20 years. We like to be farmers, we love to be farmers, but the rules and regulations that have been forced upon us for the last 30 years are terrible. We can't make a living, the food system is monopolized, the corporations want to run the government—so we're looking for someone to push government back, so we can be the true farmers that we love to be. Our culture loves to be farmers. The work ethic is still here; that can be lost in a very short period of time if we can't be farmers.

One of my favorite Substack people (Heather Heying, Natural Selections) wrote this in her article entitled, "It’s an Upside Down World, and You’re Living In It."

I used to be a Democrat. Two of the things that I did that felt democraty include:

I bought as much of my food as possible at farmer’s markets, and got to know the farmers who grew my food. I bought organic, and avoided GMOs. When given a choice, I bought food that was grown closer to how it had been before humans got involved—cows that had spent their lives grazing outside, coffee grown in the shade on farms with canopy trees, tomatoes and strawberries picked at perfect ripeness, transported as little as possible, eaten fresh and raw.

And I refused pharmaceuticals except when absolutely necessary—the notable exception being vaccines, which I barely questioned until Covid raised my awareness. Over the counter drugs were no better. The rule of thumb in our house was: the longer it’s been on the market, the more likely it is to be safe. Aspirin seemed like a pretty safe bet, as did some antibiotics, in moderation. Everything else? Buyer beware.

I still do these things. My behavior was always informed by an evolutionary understanding of the world, a fundamental preference for solutions that have stood the test of time (e.g. beef over lab-grown meat), and wanting as little corporate product and involvement in my life as possible. Such behavior just doesn’t seem democraty anymore. It seems like the opposite.

In response, I wrote the following.

For decades, I have been saying that the Republicans need to reinvent themselves as the party of human-scale life. Seeing Trump and Kennedy together call to Make America Healthy Again gives me more hope in that direction than I've had in a long time.

Your beautiful, healthy approach to living felt Democrat-y to you, but in my life it has always been embraced by a mixture of folks, from hippies to conservative Christians, who shared a love of what we saw rejected by mainstream society: children and family life; non-medicalized childbirth and homebirth; the critical importance of breastfeeding; independent and home education; the belief that children can be far more competent and responsible than we give them credit for; small businesses; small farms and natural foods; the superior flavor and health benefits of raw milk and juice, pasture-raised animals, and organically-grown fruits and vegetables; homesteading and preserving/restoring the land; reclaiming heritage breeds and seeds; and a deep concern for the environment that was called conservation before it was taken over and ruined by the environmentalist movement. 

If the Republican Party will truly embrace and fight for these values, I will in turn be thrilled to have finally become a Republican after 56 years a Democrat. The beginning of the end of my complacency with the Democratic Party was discovering the party's intense opposition to homeschooling—despite the fact that so many of the home education pioneers were radical liberals in their day.

Home education may have been the beginning of my disaffection, but the disconnect between the Democratic Party and the values I thought were their priorities became more and more obvious, accelerating at a most alarming rate, to the point where I agree with Dr. Heying again:

The democrats are claiming that they’re on the side of the little people. The only proper response to such claims is this: No. No you are not. Stop lying. And: No.

Republicans, this is your chance. Don't blow it by infighting, nor by sabotage from within. Reach out to the Independents and disaffected Democrats—like Dr. Heying, and RFK Jr., and Sasha Stone...and me—who are reaching out to you, willing—eager—to put aside our differences long enough to do the really hard work of seeking and saving that which is rapidly being lost.

I grew up a conservationist. That's the kind of thing that happens when you live in the shadow of New York's Adirondack Mountains, and your father is a Boy Scout leader who loves camping and hiking, and frequently takes you mountain climbing with his buddies from work. "Forever Wild" gets in your blood.

From before I can remember, I knew how to respect the mountains, the waters, the flora, and the fauna. Dad wouldn't have it any other way.  We subscribed to The Conservationist magazine, and treated the land and animals everywhere else properly as well. It's not surprising, then, that in my teenaged years I was drawn to what became known as the Environmentalist Movement.

That infatuation did not last, as the movement quickly moved beyond saving wild areas and animal habits, cleaning up air and water, and promoting responsible human encounters with nature.  It became political, and extreme; it chose large-scale activism over human scale efforts; and it lost me.

All this flooded back to me when I read "Can American Conservation Survive ‘Green’ Energy?" It reminded me that someone said—it may have been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for whom conservation is a critical issue, but I'm not certain—"The Democratic Party has focused its concern for the environment on one thing and one thing only:  climate change.  It is now the Republicans who are thinking about habitat destruction, species extinction, the destruction of the land, and our nation's food supply." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist of it.

Thanks to our unique history of conservation and a culture of preservation, Americans have, for many decades, taken for granted their access to natural beauty.

Organizations ... founded by concerned citizens serve to champion habitat restoration and protection. Indeed, such was the very foundation of the modern environmental movement spawning nonprofits that advocate for policy, educate, install oyster beds, guard sea turtles, clean woodlands, “save the whales,” remind drone operators about the negative impacts of unmanned vehicles on wildlife, and, of course, constrain or prevent drilling and mining projects to preserve species and habitats.

But now the environmental movement is at odds with itself. The movement’s full-throated embrace of so-called “green energy,” successfully amplified by unprecedented government mandates and subsidies, is leading to habitat-invading and beauty-destroying energy projects at scales that not only rankle onlookers but also those environmentalists still committed to stewardship and conservation—and would shock the founders of the preservation movement.

In California, a 2,300-acre solar project requires destroying thousands of 150–200 year-old Joshua Trees, also the habitat of endangered desert tortoises. Locals object. Officials approve.

Disputes in Maine about where to put massive wind turbine projects pit environmental groups against conservationists intent on protecting wilderness and wildlife. Paradoxically, the state has the nation’s strictest mining laws, precluding any possibility of directly sourcing even a portion of the raw materials necessary to construct the turbines and solar panels slated for deployment to Maine’s electrical grid. [emphasis mine]

Meantime in Vermont a solar panel project that would cover 227 football fields of pristine landscape is being vigorously opposed.

‘Green’ energy policies come at the expense of far greater land and water use. [They] also ignore increased foreign resource dependence and environmental impacts overseas. The production of useful energy, which drives economic productivity, is always about tradeoffs. Americans are unlikely to tolerate increasingly obvious ‘green’ tradeoffs. [emphasis mine]

In addition to affordable cars, air conditioners, and smart phones, virtually all Americans want clean air and abundant, biodiverse seas and wide-open spaces our 19th-century forebearers helped to realize.  You can bet future generations will too. It’s in our nature. And our energy policies and choices should reflect that.

Here's an interesting video about toilet paper I just came across (17 minutes @ regular speed, language warning). It begins with the extreme statement that the average American uses 141 rolls of toilet paper a year. You may recognize that as a useless, inflammatory statistic. First of all, I question any statement that tries to give itself credibility by being more precise than justified. To say 141 conveys no more information than "around 140" but looks more scientific because of the extra significant digit. But I'm quibbling. The real issue is that toilet paper rolls come in a variety of sizes, so that number could easily be off by a factor of three, even if you only count household use; office and public bathrooms often use industrial-sized rolls. So all this number really means is that Americans use a lot of toilet paper.

This makes me suspect the other numbers in the video as well. So why am I posting it? Well, the history of toilet paper, and toilet paper alternatives, is interesting. Though come to think of it, I quarrel with some of that, too. The idea that excrement is "gross" was not the invention of clever marketers, as any reader of the Old Testament will attest.

Still, it got me rethinking the idea of a bidet, one of the ones that attaches right to your existing toilet. Actually, I've been envying the Japanese their fancy toilets since we visited there in 2006, but that's both more money and more work than I'm in the mood for. But I always thought of a bidet as a luxury item for occasional use; it never occurred to me that it could replace toilet paper. (Think how handy that would have been in 2020.) And I'd never heard of "bidet towels," which make a lot of sense. I mean, you don't save toilet paper if you use it to dry off afterwards. Then again, Japanese toilets do the drying for you, too: wash, flush, and blow dry.

When we lived in Rochester, New York, one of our neighbors grew red and black currant bushes in her backyard, and shared them with us. Sadly, she moved away soon after we become acquainted, and the bushes were removed. At the time, I thought the new residents just didn't want to bother with them, but maybe they knew something I didn't:

The plants were illegal. Here's the story. (17 minutes at normal speed)

In brief: Plants of the genus Ribes, which also includes gooseberries, are susceptible to a fungus that also produces white pine blister rust, which in the early 1900's was devastating our white pine trees.

Apparently the lumber industry had a more vigorous lobby than the gooseberry family, and our federal government both outlawed the Ribes family and began a massive program of eradication. If it had been the 21st century, gooseberry fans would have been demonetized on YouTube and banned from Twitter.

The federal regulations against Ribes were lifted in 1966, but many states still prohibit or restrict it. My neighbor's yard didn't become a legal site until 2003, and many places in New York still aren't. Here's an interesting list of state regulations. My favorite may be Pennsylvania: "In 1933, Pennsylvania passed a law that limited growing gooseberries and currants in certain areas; however, the law is not enforced. Therefore, all Ribes can be grown in the state."

(It must be pointed out, however, that laws that are traditionally not enforced can still be a threat. if your name is Donald Trump, growing currants in Pennsylvania might still land you in court faster than you can eat one.)

Back in the early 1900's, national governments apparently felt they were faced with a stark choice: save the pine trees, or save the currants and gooseberries. The United States chose lumber; Europe chose food. Both are important, of course, but in hindsight it seems clear that letting nature take its course might have been best. When governments take to using hatchets when flyswatters will do, bad things happen. In subsequent years, better approaches to the white pine blister rust problem have been developed. I suspect these developments would have come sooner if we hadn't decided to commit plant genocide instead.

Because of their great nutritional benefits, Ribes, especially black currants, are making a slow comeback. But I've never seen them in our local grocery store. For that, so far I still need to make a trip to Europe, where currants and gooseberries are easily found.

You might enjoy the post I wrote 13 years ago about my visit to a farm near Basel, Switzerland, where I was allowed to taste freely of gooseberries, three colors of currants, and other marvelous fruits that are difficult to procure here.

UPDATE 1: I have it on good authority that there's at least one farm in New Jersey where I can pick gooseberries and currants if I'm passing through at the right time. It would be interesting to know if "currants" listed on their website also includes the black variety, which New Jersey still heavily restricts—that is, if the Wikipedia article is correct, which is a risky assumption, though less so with currants than with current events).

UPDATE 2: Do not be confused by what are called Zante currants, which look like mini-raisins and are made from small grapes. You can find Ribes black currant products on amazon.com, but a search is more likely to misdirect you, if that's what you're looking for.

UPDATE 3: In the United Kingdom, Australia, and no doubt some other parts of the world, purple Skittles candies are black current flavored. In the United States, the flavor is grape. Not content with trying to eradicate the plant itself, we seem intent on eradicating America's taste for the fruit.

The same guy who brought you the 18-Minute Cabin had an old, broken down pop-up camper that he decided to renovate from the ground up. I know a few people who might find the work interesting; I know I did. (44 minutes, does well at 2x speed.)

I've really enjoyed his YouTube channel, black spruce. Perhaps it's the uncertainty of life these days that makes me especially appreciate people with these kinds of skills. Either that, or I just like watching other people work. :)

The builders in our family might enjoy this video.  I'm not a builder, but I loved watching this cabin-in-the-woods go together in 18 minutes.  That is, a 36-minute video watched at 2x speed.  The actual project took about a month.

If you liked this one, you can see more of the story here.

Enough is enough.

I won't drink Bud Light. I won't buy Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

Big deal. I don't like beer, and I've long found Ben & Jerry's not worth the price, especially since they sold out.

I almost never buy spices from Penzey's—previously my absolute favorite spice source—having found alternatives that aren't deliberately offensive to half their potential customers. I still buy King Arthur flour, because it's simply the best I've found, but the company has become more aggressive in pushing their political positions, and that has left a bad taste in my mouth—maybe not the smartest move when you're a food company.

Or any company.

I get it. Corporations are run by people, and people have opinions and favorite causes. A business can seem like a very handy bulldozer with which to push those opinions and causes. But behavior that may be appropriate for individuals and small businesses is annoying (or much worse) when adopted by large companies.

Corporations: You want to make the world better? I have some suggestions for what to do with your money and influence. Do these first, before throwing your weight around in places that have nothing to do with your business. And if you can, do it quietly, without blowing your own trumpet too much, please.

• Think and act locally. Make your community glad to have you as a neighbor.
• Provide good jobs, and pay your employees fairly. You have extra funds? Give them a raise, or at least a bonus.
• Improve working conditions. Consider not only physical health and safety but mental and social health, and opportunities for autonomy and initiative.
• Clean up your act. Wherever you are, make the water and air you put out cleaner than that which you took in. (Until the late 1960's, my father worked for the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, and I've never forgotten his comment that the water that went back into the Mohawk River from their plant was cleaner than what they had taken out of it. Whether that said more about GE's water treatment or the state of the Mohawk at the time I leave to your speculation.)
• If you're a publicly-held company, don't forget your shareholders. Think beyond next quarter's numbers and work to make your business a good long-term investment.
• Return charity to where it belongs. Instead of using their money to contribute to your favorite causes, lower your prices and let your customers decide what to do with the extra cash. Maybe they'll contribute to their favorite causes. Freely-given charity is always better than forced charity. Maybe they'll even spend the extra money on more of your products, who knows? But being generous with other people's money doesn't make you virtuous, it makes you despicable. 
• Improve your product. Are you making or doing something worthwhile? Then do it better.

Any or all of these business improvements would make the world a better place without controversy. I've never understood why a company would deliberately and aggressivly seek to alienate half its customer base, but that seems to be happening more and more frequently. Do they think those who appreciate their controversial stance will out of gratitude buy more to take up the slack? Do they think they can ride out a temporary downturn and that those who are offended will quickly forget and go back to "business as usual?" My cynical side thinks they may be right about the latter, but I also think we may be reaching a tipping point.

I'm not a fan of boycots, preferring to make my commercial decisions based on quality and price rather than on politics. But I sense, in myself and in others, a growing distaste for dealing with companies that have gone out of their way to make it clear they think I'm not good enough to be their customer. I still shop at Target, but I just realized that the last time was more than three months ago. I still buy King Arthur flour, but find myself less inclined to linger over their catalog and consider their other products. Penzey's still has some products I can't get elsewhere, and I won't rule out another purchase—but I find myself unconsciously doing without instead. Small potatoes, sure. What difference can one formerly enthusiastic customer make to such large corporations? 

A big difference, if that one person is part of a groundswell of discontent. I think it's happening.

I call on all businesses to adopt my simple model of true corporate responsibility. If you want to see better fruit, nourish the world at its roots.

Here ya' go. No politics, nothing depressing. Serious, but light. No puppies or kittens, but Beaver Engineers. Take a couple of minutes and read Heather Heying's "Just How Busy Is the Beaver?" Here's a taste:

Beavers are woefully underestimated. They create the landscapes that they live in, and maintain those landscapes efficiently and fervently. Beavers are indeed busy, and their hard work creates habitat for countless others.

Where today there are flat, fertile valleys, the first Americans would have walked into wetlands from slope to slope. Frogs and fish flourished in the water, butterflies, bees, and birds did so in the air; and all manner of plants thrived on land. Beavers, like nearly all dedicated herbivores, require a diverse diet of many species. Where beavers thrive, so too do the species on which they depend. Beavers had already been dominant for a very long time by the time the first people arrived in America, and had transformed it into a verdant landscape. In the American West, which is now known for its droughts and fires, a beaver engineered landscape was both a wetter and more resilient place, far more immune to the vicissitudes of the weather.

Now we have an American West wracked by fires, with waterways which have collapsed into deep arroyos and canyons that oscillate between flood and drought. When the landscape was being actively maintained by beavers, it was greener and wetter, and more resistant to both drought and fire.

Far from being simply a pest species, beavers were the water managers of North America. They were builders and gardeners, whose millions of years of work here helped build resilient ecosystems. Some of our most tenacious environmental problems would be alleviated if we welcomed beavers back.

You know I'm a big fan of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying—the folks I call my favorite Left Coast Liberals. There's a lot we disagree about, but plenty of common ground, and I admire their dogged search for truth and willingness to follow where it leads, even if that sometimes aligns them with people they were once taught to despise.

For longer than I have known of them, YouTube has been profiting off their popular DarkHorse Podcast without remunerating them in any way. That is, YouTube "demonetized" them, which means that they can no longer get revenue from the ads YouTube attaches to their posts. The ads are still there, but YouTube takes all the profit for themselves, instead of just a percentage. (Okay, I'm aware that 100% is also a percentage; you know what I mean.) It's a dirty trick, and forces content creators to tie themselves in knots trying to avoid giving YouTube an excuse to demonetize them or to shut them down altogether. In frustration and protest, many creators have left YouTube. But that's a tough way to go, as YouTube's stranglehold as a video content platform is exceedingly strong.

One alternative that has become more and more popular is Rumble, largely because it makes a point of censoring only the most egregious content (e.g. pornography, illegal behavior) while encouraging free speech and debate, including unpopular views—such as the idea that the COVID-19 virus was originally created in the Wuhan lab during U.S.-sponsored gain-of-function research. While widely accepted now, it was not long ago that expressing such an opinion on YouTube was a fast track to oblivion.

Rumble has been steadily making improvements, but it's still not as polished and easy to use as YouTube. YouTube still has a virtual monopoly, so few content creators can afford to drop it altogether. And if your content has no political, medical, or socially-unacceptable content, it's hard to find the incentive to make the effort to switch. So I won't be boycotting YouTube any time soon. 

That said, I'm glad to see that while we were out of the country, DarkHorse began moving to Rumble. Apparently they will do what many other creators have done, keeping a smaller presence on YouTube, which has by far the wider reach, while enduing Rumble with additional content. Viva Frei, for example (my favorite Canadian lawyer's site), does the first half hour or so of his podcast on both YouTube and Rumble, then invites his YouTube viewers to move to Rumble for the rest of the show. How it will eventually work out for DarkHorse I don't know yet, but for the moment, their podcasts still appear on YouTube, but the question-and-answer sessions, along with some other content, are exclusive to Rumble.

In honor of DarkHorse's new venue, and to give myself a chance to learn how to embed a Rumble video here, the following is the Q&A session from Podcast #175.

Embedding the video turned out go be easy enough, but I haven't yet figured out how to specify beginning and ending times. So I'll just mention that the section from 12:47 to 31:10, where Bret and Heather deal with the subject of childhood vaccinations, is particularly profitable.  It may lead some of my readers to realize how insightful they themselves were many long years ago.

Heather's brief environmental rant from 1:11:35 to 1:12:45 is also worth listening to.

The 20th anniversary DarkHorse Podcast is full of apparently random interesting topics. If you have the time for the whole hour and 40 minute show, you can skip to about minute 11:30 to get past the ads. There is discussion of sea star wasting disease, then a very long section on telomeres and how both the New York Times (no surprise) and the New England Journal of Medicine (more concerning) recently managed to ignore critical information that was known 20 years ago.

I enjoyed those parts, but if you just start at 1:13:00 you'll get 26 minutes of really good stuff, I think. From finding truth in the words of people with whom you have serious disagreements, to the complex problem of moving forward without losing the good of what you've left behind, to why dishwashers that use less water might poison the environment by forcing the use of more and stronger detergents.

My favorite part, however, and the part I think some of our family members will appreciate, is the discussion of Elimination Communication at about 1:28:10, and the idea of the new mother's "babymoon" period just before that. (They don't use either of those terms, however.) Not that our famly will find anything new there—and it's been known for years among the homeschool/home birth/breastfeeding/raw milk/organic food/homesteading/etc. crowd. What's so interesting to me is that it shows up in this podcast, totally unexpectedly. In their naïveté about the subject, Bret and Heather get some things wrong (as their listeners were quick to point out) but they get a lot right, too, and at least they are aware of it, which most people are not.

I've admired Joel Salatin and his Polyface Farms for a long time, but many years have passed since I first read Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.  I'd lost track of him in the ensuing years, but he recently popped up after another YouTube video, in this Hillsdale College lecture.  I hope you enjoy it; that man is right about many things.  (15 minutes)

Here's another treat for you from Heather Heying's substack, Natural Selections: Stark and Exposed: It's the Modern Way.  I'll include a small excerpt, but first, I'll quote a passage from Chapter 8 of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, the third book of his Space Trilogy, because that is what immediately came to mind when I was reading her essay.

The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.

“Why have you done that, Professor?” said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. “I shouldn’t have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I’m rather fond of trees myself.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” replied Filostrato. “The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the brier. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilized tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminum. So natural, it would even deceive.”

“It would hardly be the same as a real tree,” said Winter.

“But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess.”

“I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing.”

“Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”

“Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”

“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.”

“I wonder what the birds will make of it?”

“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”

“It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”

“And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”

“Go on,” said Winter.

“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”

“That’s true.”

“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms—sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”

“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”

“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mold—all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how.

That Hideous Strength was written in 1945, but this doesn't sound nearly as ridiculous as it did when I first read it in college.  "By little and little" we have come closer to this attitude than I could ever have believed.

From Dr. Heying's essay I will leave out the depressing part that brought Lewis's book to mind—but I urge you to read it for yourself.  Instead, I'll quote the more uplifting end of the story.

Go outside barefoot. Stand there, toes moving in the bare earth, or grass, or moss, or sand. Touch the Earth with your bare skin. Stand on one foot for a while. Then the other. Jump. Stand with your arms wide and gaze upwards at the sun. Welcome it. Do not cover your skin and keep the sun’s rays at bay.

Learn to craft and to make and to grow and to build.  Work in clay or wood or metal, in ink or wool or seeds. Build dry stacked stone walls. Mold forms with your hands and your tools. Add color to walls, to fabric, to food. Throw. Weave. Carve. Cure. Ferment. Fire. Braze. Weld. Create that which is both functional and beautiful.

Get cold every day. Go outside under-dressed or open your windows wide for a spell even sometimes in Winter or take a cold shower or immerse yourself in cold, cold water. You will be shocked. And you will be awake. And you will know that you are alive.

Also enjoy being warm. Be grateful for it. Come inside and find a cozy corner. Wrap yourself in a soft woolen blanket. Have a familiar by your side. Run your hands through his fur. Drink warm elixir from a handmade mug. Be present. Consider the past. Build the future.

Here's an interesting article about a New Haven, Connecticut company called Protein Evolution, and why they may have an approach that could finally make recycling plastic economically viable: Protein Evolution Recycles Plastics Quickly — “1 Million Years Of Evolution In 1 Day.” That would be fantastic, if it pans out, and its own technology doesn't contain worse side effects.

Protein Evolution [announced] it has created a process that can break down plastic waste into its component parts, which can then be reused to make new plastics. Until now, it has been cheaper (assuming no cost is assigned to the damage done to the environment by plastic waste) to make new plastic than to recycle existing plastic. Protein Evolution says its technology may be able to break that economic imbalance and help the chemical industry transition to a lower carbon, circular economy.

Leveraging recent breakthroughs in natural science and artificial intelligence, the company designs enzymes to break down end-of-life textile and plastic waste into the building blocks that make up new textile and plastic products. This proprietary process is the first of its kind designed to scale up into volume production. It creates a cost effective solution with immediate applications for the petrochemical industry, global consumer goods companies, textile manufacturers, and others that are looking to significantly reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

“Nature has already produced a bacteria [sic] that can break down plastic for emission free recycling, but it’s extremely slow. If we had a few million years to wait for evolution to run its course, we’d have something much more efficient,” says co-founder Scott Stankey. “Our technology condenses a million year evolutionary process into a single day — helping us create an affordable, scalable and effective solution to revolutionize the plastic waste industry.”

On the other hand, I hate the article's snide political attitude:

Since we as humans are incapable of devising an economic system that is not based exclusively on profits or which includes environmental harm as one of the factors in calculating profitability, the only solution is to devise a process that recycles plastics more cheaply than making new plastic products.

Devising a process that makes recycling plastics economical is NOT a last-ditch, second-rate solution; it is the BEST solution. An economic system based on profits is not bad, it's what you want: If this process makes recycling plastic more profitable than pulling oil out of the ground, that profit motive will have people voluntarily cleaning up beaches, and companies eagerly pulling plastic waste out of the ocean.

And it would mean local governments could stop evading the question (or straight-out lying) about what actually happens to the materials we think are being recycled.