I was very struck when I read Thich Nhat Hanh's comment that when I see a flower, I should see a pile of manure in my mind. What? The guy must be nuts. Ruin one of the best symbols of love, life and beauty with a picture of manure? But he is not nuts at all. He knows what Richard Nisbett knows, that Eastern civilizations tend to see life as a circle and they know that the image is as good or better than the Western image of life as a line. He knows what I learned from our compost bin, that the flowers fade and deteriorate in the bin into soil which grows more flowers, in a great circle of life.
So, now that Wisconsin forbids dump owners and authorities from accepting computers, tv's, and some other electronic devices into the dump, we have to have different procedures. As I learned from an environmental lecture in 1968, "there is no away". We can't throw things away because there is no away. We have to recycle, rebuild, reuse.
Sure, it is a pain, sometimes almost an actual pain when we realize that our old tv's that weight 75 lbs can not be collected by our trash guys. We are replacing them with 14 lb. LED tv's with larger (but not too large!) screens that are more useful, have better pictures and way more connections to our other devices, both input and output. We have to pay to have local stores or authorities accept the old, heavy versions and we aren't used to that. I would be interested to know if the $15 per set fee really covers the cost of transporting and demolishing or rebuilding or whatever is being done with them. As devices get more complex and make use of rare elements, enough that it is not just oil that can make countries rich and in demand as trading partners, the tiny components, metals and substances can be quite valuable to us all.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
