Retaining Water

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures...

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I have been reading a very good book entitled Garbage Land: The Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte. And I find it ties in with my previous blog post about the fad for carrying bottles of water everywhere. I lampooned this water-drinking craze. Now I find my sarcasm was even more apt than I suspected.

In her book, Elizabeth Royte cites the fact that half-liter water bottles comprise an ever-increasing part of our garbage. A high percentage of these bottles never get recycled. They are choking our landfills, floating in our waterways, popping up and bobbing up all over the landscape. They have become the quintessential plastic menace. Like most plastic, they have the power of persistence. They will out-live us all. Maybe it will be them, and not cockroaches, that rise to rule the post-nuclear world. It is easy to conjure nightmares about these bottles - silently, stealthily massing into armies, marching on, conquering one city after another. And it will be hard to draw a bead on these things. Since most of them are transparent, they can easily take on the coloration of their surroundings. They have ready-made camouflage.

At any rate, after reading Royte's statistics on this growing component of our bulk of garbage, I felt quite self-congratulatory. I can give myself credit for not contributing to this pile of refuse. It's one more instance where I earn points on the cheap - simply by NOT doing something. In this case, I am helping the ecology simply by NOT feeling the need to drink water at frequent intervals. It's almost as easy a gig as saving the environment by staying home and watching TV. I'm not a couch potato. I'm an earnest environmentalist, dedicated to staying out of my car, off the highways, away from gas pumps.

But then in another section of Royte's book, I learned that I am also saving the environment by something I am actively doing. I hadn't even realized it. Royte tells how thousands of pigs used to roam through the streets of New York during the 1800s. People commonly kept pigs in their back yards then. Many of these pigs would inevitably escape, multiply, and run wild among the human denizens of the Big Apple. Royte says as many as 100,000 pigs ranged around Manhattan at one time. I can't help but question that figure a little. I don't recall seeing any pigs in Edward Steichen's photographs of New York during that era. I don't recall seeing any pig in any 19th century picture of New York. Still, I'm prepared to accept the fact that there were a lot of pigs somewhere on the scene in those days, even if their numbers may not quite have run into the tens of thousands. And these pigs served a real purpose. Before garbage pickup service was instituted in the City, people would chuck their offal out the windows. And the pigs were there to dispose of it. They "converted waste into edible protein."

Of course, the pigs generated their own waste. Their manure was added to the piles left by horses. When a serious cholera epidemic broke out in New York in the mid-1800s, it was the pigs who were largely blamed. Government officials started to designate one city section after another as "pig-free zones." It became illegal to keep pigs in these areas. By the late 1890s, pigs had been banned altogether. And people had to start relying on human garbage collectors to pick up their refuse.

Reading all this, I began to see how I have actually been doing my bit to return my city to that more cost-effective mode of garbage collection. It all started when I began to see the occasional possum scuttle through my yard at night. I was thrilled to witness this wildlife. I encouraged the visitations by putting out tidbits of food. Over the course of a year or so, I began to attract several possums and a number of raccoons. Now my garden is a virtual nature preserve. Me and the possums and the raccoons and the squirrels and the birds and my cat are all getting along famously. I don't need to go on expensive safaris, or on rural retreats to see wildlife. It comes to me.

People hardly believe I can entertain such wildlife guests, here in a heavily trafficked section of Chicago. But it's true. I have the pictures to prove it. And as a bonus of these visitations, I get a lot of my garbage automatically processed. I have been able to forget about occupying myself with any touchy, elaborate composting procedures. I can just put out my scraps, my slightly over-the-hill bananas, my brownish apples, etc., etc., mix in some legitimate wildlife chow - and have it all gone by morning, turned into more wildlife-viewing opportunity.

It's true that my possums and raccoons don't quite serve the same extent of function the pigs of New York served. Those pigs were eventually eaten. I hardly could contemplate such a fate for my wildlife visitors. (Although several southern-born acquaintances of mine chuckle that they have some good possum pie recipes at the ready, passed down to them from their mothers - should I ever change my mind.)

But no. I'm just gloating over this easy recycling operation I have built from the ground up. On the one hand, I'm not contributing to the blight of plastic, simply by not having jumped on the water drinking bandwagon. And on the other hand, I am positively fostering a nothing-goes-to-waste cycle of use, with my wildlife collaborators. I really am very environmentally correct. I really am a very good person.