Being a commentary on our throw-away society.
"I'll tell you, son, the minority got us out-numbered!"
— Congersman Frog from the Pogo cartoon
Commander Oliver Hazard Perry was an American war hero. During the War of 1812 he became the first person in history to capture a squadron of the British Royal Navy during the Battle of Lake Erie. Even though he almost lost his flagship he was able to force a surrender, and reported his victory with the phrase "We have met the enemy and they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop." This was a turning point in the war, and is justly recognised as such.
In 1970, cartoonist Walt Kelly designed a poster¹ for Earth Day paraphrasing Perry's statement, and the following year drew a special Pogo comic expanding on the theme of humanity spoiling and disrespecting the environment.
As a teen, I was exposed to Pogo through my father's collection and this was one of the phrases that stuck in my head. That "we are our own worst enemy" became a sort of environmental mantra for me, as I recognised that we were increasingly taking from our planet with little thought for the consequences. When I was quite little (around age seven) I remember seeing a documentary about mining copper, which showed a vast open pit mine. At the close of the program there was an aerial shot climbing up and away, and I was left with a sense of dismayed horror at the sight of this ugly scar on the landscape. I asked my father why we needed all that copper, and he explained how it was used in electrical wiring, and how there was so much demand for it. A few weeks earlier we had thrown away an old radio that had stopped working, and I asked why, if copper was so important, why we'd thrown it out instead of taking the copper wire out. His response was along the lines of "It's complicated, but it's too difficult to do". Further questioning led me to understand that what he meant is "people don't care enough about it", which was to me as horrifying as the image that had prompted the question.
My father was not a bad person. He despised waste, being the sort of person who would squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out of the tube. My mother would collect the end slivers of soap and sew them into a cheesecloth bag for for use in the kitchen. Dad drove like petrol was about to run out. This was their life, having lived through WWII and the resulting austerity; waste was not in their vocabulary. "Make do and mend" was still a part of how I was brought up, and so my father's cavalier attitude to tossing out perfectly good, valuable metals was quite shocking.
As I write this, it's Amazon Prime Day, a consumerist holiday if ever there was one. People will be throwing their credit cards at the internet to buy even more stuff they don't need, locked into a shopping addiction ("retail therapy"!) that is bad for them and the planet. I remember sitting with a friend on his front porch for an hour, watching a stream of vans from Amazon and the like delivering package after package to the three other visible houses. I remember visiting another friend who was bemoaning her fate because her candle shelf wouldn't bear another candle. I counted a hundred of them from some specialty online store, wrapped in plastic, waiting for the chance to be lit. Another friend of mine lived with a hoarder who would order several times a week from Amazon, just to get the packages. She had a room full of opened packages, contents still inside. This is consumerism at it's most awful. I feel an odd mix of pity and loathing for these people, who are brainwashed into thinking that somehow consuming more stuff will make them feel better. It's not even about keeping up with the Joneses any more, it seems more about media telling them that this is their best medicine.
But we all consume. I'm no different, I admit. But like my Dad, I try to wring the most out of everything I buy. I'm typing this on a laptop that many people would be replacing (the keyboard is slowly falling apart, the trackpad buttons no longer work and one of the speakers is crackling). But I will get another year out of the battery before that needs replacement, I can change out the keyboard for a new one and I've a workaround for the other issues. On the other hand I've a Bluetooth speaker that has given up the ghost and I'm unsure whether I can get replacements to fix it. I've become an advocate for the Right to Repair, I've bought an iFixit tool kit so I can fiddle with things to keep them going. I avoid buying things in packaging that I can't reuse or recycle. My food comes from the farmers' market not a fast food joint and I pick my groceries so as to reduce packaging. I refill my shampoo and conditioner bottles. I keep my car serviced and drive like my Dad did. I only reluctantly changed my phone and that because the screen was so badly cracked that it was hard to use. The old phone will become a music server for the living room. I wear my clothes until they practically fall off my body, and I take a strange kind of pride in it. To throw something broken away hurts; I've either mistreated it or bought the wrong thing.
I now also boycott Peet's Coffee because they no longer serve their drinks in anything other than disposable cups – the sheer volume of those chucked out every day is staggering, and I'm not yet counting all those plastic stirrers either. Our society relies on disposables to "keep the economy healthy", and meanwhile we keep growing our population year on year, so it's going to get worse.
"But", you say, "we're recycling all sorts of things these days!", and you're quite correct. In my city there's recycling for food waste, paper, cardboard, glass, metal cans and (most) plastics. This is surely a good thing? Maybe. Except much of this material is being shunted around the country or even around the world before it can be turned into a reusable material, and that transport and the processing requires energy. I can see the value in aluminium and maybe other metals. But plastic recycling may actually be creating a new problem. Instead of casting away plastics to grow landfills and the Pacific Gyre we turn it into plastics that we can reuse! Except the processing can create large quantities of microplastics that end up in the water. In turn, that winds up in the fish that most of us eat, so we end up with them in our bodies. I read recently² that they've been found in the clouds over Japan. How long until they are in every bite and breath we take? And what effects will that have? I don't know, but I am frightened. These and forever chemicals are going to affect future generations, turn the frogs gay and render us impotent and infertile. Okay, I exaggerate. Maybe.
There are too many things that we cannot replace. Oil is the big one people are talking about, "We need to move to electric vehicles!" But even there, with the best of intentions, we're creating another problem. Because guess what? The minerals needed for batteries, control electronics, chargers and so on still need to be mined. And there we are, back at the beginning. Stop shopping!
Postscript. Sorry, this turned into a bit of a preachy rant. I'm going to leave it as it is, just to get it out of my system unfiltered. That said (and to bring a lighter note back into the proceedings) I encourage you to read the Pogo cartoons. Kelly's world is wide and comic and glorious, and his look at American politics is simply brilliant and funny. The effect he's had on me and my life is enormous. After all, I even married someone named after one of his characters. Coincidence or the universal malarkey? I've no idea either.
The image that inspired me
¹https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/
²https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/microplastics-clouds-study-mount-fuji-mount-oyama
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