Sunday, August 18, 2013

Sort of Like a Religion, Indeed

Calculating the number of angels that can stand on the head of a pin is child's play compared to the calculating needed to determine the number of recycling bins needed in front of a British home.

This is insane (Tip to NRO The Corner):

The bin situation is spiralling out of control. Gone are the days when you could unthinkingly chuck everything from a banana skin to a plastic bottle into one binbag and not have to worry about what would become of it all. Now, in some parts of Britain, people have up to seven different bins to separate their waste between. In the past you’d walk down a suburban street and admire the best-kept gardens or fanciest net curtains; now you finding yourself marvelling at how many differently hued bins are plonked outside every home and wondering how waste disposal and collection came to be such complicated endeavours. Personal recycling is a complete waste of time too, in environmental, “planet-saving” terms, given that household waste is a pretty small proportion of overall waste in Britain. Enforced recycling of household tat is less a practical stab at rescuing Mother Earth from climate change and more a punishment of families for being wasteful, a ritual designed to remind us of our greed and overall dirtiness by making us muck through everything we chuck away.

Yes, it is sort of like a religion, and I specifically mentioned sorting garbage as one of the rituals of the modern Green religion:

Sacraments? Of course! Mindlessly sorting green, brown, and clear glass before throwing it out. Recycling oracles at the curb for their sinful paper offerings. And composting muck to really show you're in deep. Don't forget gazing at twisty light bulbs instead of rows of little candles!

Under the old religion, it was simple: you rendered unto God what is His, and unto the government what is the government's. But rendering unto Gaia requires a lot of thought and work.

Don't sneer at the idiot Brits. It can happen here:



Full episode here.

Now go and emit no more.