THE COMPOST PILE
by Karen Yukie Yamada
"not all compost is created equal"
This past week, the Wall Street Journal "Personal Journal" section featured an article aboaut composting products for the urban dweller and suburban home owner. "Go Green" has been used for the past two years or so as a corporate marketing campaign to describe their efforts in conservation and eco-correctness. The WSJ article features products by Sierra Club "Green" Magazine that make composting for the lazy urbanite much easier. San Francisco residens are breathing a sigh of relief, after all, the City by the Bay just enacted a county-wide rule that residents must separate food wastes from yard clippings in their recycling. The green jobs of the future are being designed by the fervent conservationists who envision an economy of needs and services to support Mother Earth.
Without delving into the question of how this rule will enforced, the "Green Police" wants you to know that you, too, can make a difference by eliminating that 24% of refuse from food and yard waste from entering our landfills. Imagine, a whole army of "Green Police" marching through the streets of San Francisco to peer into YOUR backyard. Creative thinkers say: Why not? We need jobs. We use compost. We must indoctrinate the public into responsible behavior given the threat to Mother Nature.
In the "green" economy of California, in particular in San Francisco, jobs, jobs, jobs is the mantra. Soon worms, worms, worms will be a special gift item for newlyweds to start their own composting when discarding cardboard from their new furnishing. As this article reminds us, worms eat and work. Very low maintenance. Try Uncle Jim's Worm Farm in Spring Grove Pennsylvania for your worm supply when starting your Worm Factory ($109.95). Worms may be the understated metaphor for sustainability in Marin County neighborhoods and villas. In fact, I can ust see Senator Barbara Boxer rolling her own controlled environment Ecocomposter filled with used Starbucks coffee grounds up and down her backyard.
In this not-so-glamorous reality of styrofoam-filled landfills, even the nouveau riche have found metaphors for regenration in their Naturemill Automatic Composter that turns and heats without a pitchfork. This creation, by a Massachusettes Institute of Technology engineer from San Francisco, makes composting part of the daily household doings. Available in colors, soon they will have entire school districts holding mural contests to see wh can design the best Naturemill Automatic Composter. Go green!
For the beginner green mind, meaning someone who has not lived, worked and socialized in a culture where mindless consumerism has been identified as the single source of waste and hazard to sustainability, there is something wrong with this picture, but it is hard to argue the point of promoting composting products. The Sierra Club conjures up the sense that these people really, really care, yet something just doesn't click. What is it about composting products in the Wall Street Journal that strikes one as out of context? Perhaps they are attempting to acknowledge the problem with our landfills while offering a source of revenue to microenterprises.
The "aha" moment has arrived. While these composting products cost about the same as cell phones, most Americans are concerned about whether or not they will have their basic needs met in the coming years. How to dispose of our rubbish is a matter that has been considered by City and County bureaucracies since the beginning of government. Why should citizens now have to be regulated for their behavior with regard to how food is packaged? This consumer culture of choice, convenience and speed has become the way professional routine and social rituals are organized.
This social marketing campaign by California, England and towns across America is to create a way of liviing, thinking and consuming. In the way that smoking cigarettes and tobacco once represented cool, tough and glamorous, composting is the way to responsible living on Mother Earth where there is limited space and resources. Behavior modification applied to going "green" will inevitably lead to the need for social pressure as well as the Green Police brigade. Guilt works, and in San Francisco they will likely find a way to surrender to shame and make a point about conservation.
Could we guilt the same stakeholders into acknowledging that mind control consumerism got everyone here for no other reason except that someone made a lot of money along the way? Who's responsible for this anyway? It better not be someone from the Massachusettes Institute of Technology. How much do you want to bet that the amount of electricity used by super computer systems that allow cyber-services to run information throughout the world will soon be posted on a Green Police website near you. The Green Police will demand conservation by all systems, even the systems that run the world of commerce and information. MIT has already figured the answer to THAT problem. For a profit, of course.
