Living in the dump

My friend JB and I got to talking about environmentalism the other day. He knows a lot of the Green people are nuts, although of course he doesn't know about Ray Moose and the prehistory of the sixties, so he is generally down on "save the Earth" movements. He doesn't like the fact that the Vatican went carbon-neutral, for example, even though he sees nothing wrong with being carbon neutral. In his view, it symbolically aligns the Catholic Church with an anti-Catholic crowd.

Now he has a point. In fact, JB may have caught onto one of Moose's schemes: just like the Nazi's needed an emergency to get folks to hand power over to Hitler, so today global warming is the Big Crisis demanding that something be done so fast and so effectively that we need to hand over all our power to the government. Sound crazy?

Yeah. Crazy like a Moose.

But then JB brought up an argument against recycling. Of all the resources in the world, he said, surely we have a lot of sand and a lot of trees. So why are we recycling glass and paper? The recycling process loses money, as you can see from the fact that no private agencies undertake to do it: it's always government run. And we are nowhere close to running out of room for dumps and landfills. We recycle, he argued, to make ourselves feel better.

Now let me focus the conversation. I don't know whether his premises are all true: Does glass actually degrade when buried? Do we have that many trees? He could not verify the premises either; he just read the argument somewhere and liked it. At the moment, I am not worried about whether the premises are true, but about whether the argument follows.

JB is an economist, and he has acquired what I call a quantitative mind. He tends to focus on amounts, credits and deficits, formulas, limits, mechanical possibilities. Mathematical thinking has become not just second nature for him but a way of seeing the world. But I have what I would call a qualitative mind, so I tend to focus on form, nature, beauty, goodness or badness. This makes communication difficult.

At the time, I didn't say much of anything. But my reaction to his argument was that I would be willing to pay more for glass and paper to prevent another landfill from happening. The landfill itself is inherently displeasing to me. You start with a prairie or a wood, then you plow down the trees and grass, then you dig up not just the topsoil but all the layers below, then you fill it with trash, refuse, broken bottles, disposable diapers, plastic bags. When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

The thought depresses me. This is not an argument, I know, but could it be a perception of something true? A sure sign of a bad neighborhood, a neighborhood of crime and desperation, is trash in the yards. A sure sign of depression is when a person stops cleaning his house and just lets it go. There is something inherently disordered about just trashing because it's easier and cheaper.

I think that is why the Vatican went green, and why Popes have spoken in favor of environmental stewardship. It's not because pollution is causing an immediate crisis; maybe it is, but that is not the ultimate point. It's not because the Vatican wants to curry the favor of the left; maybe the left likes what the Vatican says about environmentalism, but that is not even the proximate point. The point is that healthy human beings clean up after themselves. When we are right with God and right the world, we atone for sin and pick up trash.

We can ignore Ray Moose. This is not his issue.