Nihilism On Parade

"My comfortable existence is reduced to a shallow meaningless party" - Police, "Driven To Tears"
I rode my bike to school today after being told in a none-too-condescending way by the folks at NBC last night that this would help the environment. And save the planet. And get Al Gore elected to President of something, maybe NBC/Universal. I didn't ride my bike because I was told to, I did it in spite of being told. Like I have for the past ten years.
Now, before you start nominating me for that prize that Al Gore won, I have to say that I know that I am still not on the low end of the carbon footprint scale. I have plenty of friends who make me and my forty-two inch television and excessive trips to fast-food joints look bad. And of course there's my wife. And Al Gore. I don't want a medal, but I do wonder how much we can save the planet before we surrender to the notion that there is a limit to our natural resources.
I took my fourth grade class to the education center at our county's recycling transfer station. I've been doing this trip for the past five years, and it's always a big hit, except for the part where the kids realize they are looking at and smelling other people's garbage. Alameda County has moved from having just twelve percent of waste diverted from landfills in 1990 to fifty-four percent in 2004 to a whopping sixty percent in 2006. The goal for 2010 is seventy-five percent. I believe that we will be successful. And it still won't matter.
Why? Because of the little matter of twenty-five percent. We're slowing down, but there's still a vortex into which all of this waste goes. All those snappy-looking hybrid SUVs aren't running on sunshine, they're using fossil fuel which continues to be digested and spewed out into the atmosphere by the ton. Amazing to think that something that is lighter than air can still be measured in tons. But I digress, back to my bike ride: I came up behind a waste management truck, and while they were busy managing the waste in color-coded barrels at the curbside, the big diesel engine just kept running. All the paper and plastic and aluminum went into the left side, and all the non-recyclable garbage went into the right side, and when the barrels were empty, the truck pulled forward twelve feet, and the process started again.
We can still save our planet. For a while, anyway.