Remember handkerchiefs? For our younger readers, there was a time when, if you had to blow your nose, you used an ornate square of cloth kept in your purse or pocket. Here’s the weird part: you didn’t throw it out. You tucked your “snot rag” away to use over again until it was deemed dirty.
Even then you did not throw it out. It went into the weekly wash along with your favorite sun dress or polo shirt. For generations raised on one-and-done Kleenex this may be TMI, but brace yourselves young people, there is more.
Imagine washing and reusing diapers or getting take-out beer from a bar in a small tin bucket. Time was when there were no drive-thru restaurants or plastic utensils, and you always cleaned your plate, literally and figuratively.
Cities reeked of horse manure because the stuff was everywhere. You lived in these smelly cities because everything was in walking distance. Blocks of ice delivered by horse-drawn carts cooled refrigerators. Cars were a novelty, not a necessity.
My dad and his aunt supplied many of these anecdotes. They were born in the 1920s and 1890s, respectively, back when women were women and men did all the voting. Around this time dirt-cheap energy was discovered quite literally oozing from the ground,
That discovery changed everything. The next century was a fossil-fuel-fed frenzy of ever-increasing production and consumption of oil, gas and all kinds of other “stuff” made from it. By 2019 the US was burning through 93 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy to meet the needs of 331 million Americans. More than 80 percent of that from fossil fuels.
That’s about 2,500 BTUs or 625,000 calories per person per day, the same amount of energy as each of us—kids included—eating 1,136 Big Macs. In. One. Day. For a little perspective: One gallon of gasoline holds about 28 million calories or about 51,000 Big Macs. Yet, less than one third of the energy we consume each day goes to transportation.
The rest goes to buying all the “stuff” we can’t live without shortly before we throw it out: Kleenix, Pampers, plastic water bottles, plastic straws, Baggies, tin foil, incomprehensible amounts of agricultural chemicals, incomprehensible amounts of clothing, bread crusts, four-day-old Dim Sum, four-year-old flat-screen TVs, and date-stamped gourmet cookies to name an infinitesimally small sample.
All compliments of our inexhaustible appetite for exhausting fossil fuels. It’s how each of us produces three times more trash than anybody else in the world. Energy may not be created or destroyed, but it sure can be wasted and doing so in this country is almost a status symbol.
Generations before us worked long hours so their kids could buy all this “stuff” getting thrown out. So much so, being a “hard worker” became the highest form of praise in this country, regardless of what you worked hard at. All while we turned a blind eye to discarding the fruits of our labor half-eaten. It’s more like 60 percent, but who’s counting.
Here’s the punch line, it appears the younger generations are questioning this “hard-worker” ethic, and not just the rich ones. Is this “Great Resignation” the dawning of a great realization that we’re wasting a lot of our lives so we can waste all that energy? Could Millennials and their kin be contemplating not wasting the most precious resource of all, our time? Or at the very least putting our time to better use: ourselves?
If so, what’s going to happen to the people, industries and infrastructure dedicated to making all the “stuff” we work so hard to waste? If not, what do we do with our mounting excesses and how do we cover the spiraling costs of the energy needed to keep producing it? Lastly, why on earth are we doing it! Some inconvenient truths and disquieting questions as we trash waste in this issue of News by Nature.
