It is so damn hard not to cynical about the shiny TV-version of the green movement and the nobody gives a shit observation of Earth Day.

I want to believe the carbon offset buying does something. It’s hard to shake the notion that it’s about as effective in changing the world as my handing a buck to a bum that made me feel just guilty enough or slightly less of a dick. It also has a weird ickiness. like a medieval, flagellating penance. You know, you do the careless flight, piss some money away, but you tithe a liberal fund and it’s all clean and purified, slate-wise.

I want to get the joke of Sheryl Crow’s no spare square asswipe. But, the biodiesel juiced bus makes me cringe. After that I start thinking about the agribusiness that greew the corn that got synthesized to fuel the car. How were those tractors fueled?

I wish it were 1970 again. Some time near the original Earth Day, our first grade class polluted an aquarium and, I think, but don’t really remember, killed some fish. A kid name Bobby, who may have been Bobby Burns, except I wasn’t Scottish a couple of centuries ago, and I got chosen to represent at the state-wide science fair at MIT.

There we stood precocious, six-year-old conservationists ‘splaining the need for clean water. Back then, water came from pipes. It didn’t come in plastic bottles that likely dirty up some resources somewhere else on the planet.

I also have some dim recollection of my brothers collecting newspaper for various drives. They would pack every square inch possible apart from perches for the driver and a passenger of Pat’s sedan. Through some magical process the collector would weigh the whole car paper and all, take out the paper and weigh the car again. The boys then got cash at some ratio for the weight of he papers.

Would more people recyle the excess crap with which we are now inundated if a Boy Scout got a check?