Questions about recycling: America’s Eight billion dollar Investment

First I should state that I am all for taking care of the environment. As God’s Image here on earth I believe that we have been entrusted with this planet to care for it as God would have us. If all creation is redeemed through Christ then Christians must be concerned about the care of creation too. But… is it really cheap and easy? The way recycling is today – what good does it really do (other than make us feel like good people)? Are we running out of recourses? Does it always help the environment? Is it worth the money we spend on it, or could we simply use that money to help the environment without recycling?

Well, the original EPA (Jay Winston Porter) who wrote the guidelines on recycling in the United States says – It may not be worth it. In reality recycling spends huge amounts of money, man power, and space (more so than already established landfills).In addition, recycling cost far more than landfilling (most of which becomes compost naturally). Landfills for instance costs around $50 a ton for disposal. Recycling on the other hand cost around $140 dollars per ton for disposal. Just think of what else we might be able to do with that money – 8 billion dollars a year! With the exception of aluminum cans which are the only recycled items that cost less to reuse than to create from scratch.

Here is another example of some problems. Paper: Most paper is made from tree farmed producers. This means that we plant trees just to make paper and then replant MORE trees (twice as many) once they have been cut down for use. And here is a little fact you won’t learn from Greenpeace - we now have 3 times more trees in North America than we did 50 years ago. Recycling however uses large factories that go through longer more costly processes (also making more expensive products), that produce more pollution in their factories (plus the doubled cost of transporting it) than simply making paper from farmed trees.

Here is just one more thing. Aren’t landfills gross (I know it isn’t smart – but it is essentially a common “green” argument). Well maybe, most of us wouldn’t want to live by a landfill while it is in its relatively short operations mode. Still landfill spaces produce small amounts of methane gas (that’s an energy source just in case you’re wondering) and they do it for free. Next this environmentally friendly gas is used to create energy to power entire homes and in only a few short years those very same landfills are then used to build some of North America’s most beautiful golf courses.

So apparently much of today’s recycling is actually quite bad for the environment, costs more money (and tax money) produces more expensive products, takes up more space, but seems to make us feel good.

Now I am not against environmentalism, in fact I think I am one in some regards, but what I am not is stupid. And I am not about to simply accept the arguments of a bunch of drugged up hippies, that can’t do their research and think protests and bongo parties are the same thing.

a new face at concernedfollower.com

well folks, seeing as i am extremely terrible at posting ANYTHING in any sort of decent time, i am more than thrilled to introduce a new writer here at concerned follower: ha kohen! ha kohen has been a friend of mine for a few years now, and i know he has some great things to say. be warned though… he may just shake you up a bit.

take a look at his series on abortion under articles.

Abortion: Part 2 - The Babies life over the mother’s freedom

Often I have heard this kind of banter. Many people today would suggest that the fully human female’s decision to end the life, or “would-be life” of a fetus takes priority over the fetus’ right to life. The suggestion has always been based on a kind of first come first served mentality. I however, would suggest the exact opposite view. It seems to me that even in a case where the mother might die but the child might live, that it is in fact the child who deserves the right to life. The child’s life, in my opinion takes priority because it has not yet been allowed the same opportunities the mother has been given. It’s rather like putting the children in the lifeboats first on a sinking ship. The mother on the other hand has most likely enjoyed fifteen or more years of life already. Besides if the fetus is truly a living human person then the question must be asked: would any decent mother allow her child to die in order to live herself? In my life I have never met one mentally stable mother who would not give her own life for the life of her child. In fact, if a mother were to suggest differently, most people would then consider her unfit.

Sadly the life of the mother usually has nothing to do with the realities of this debate at all; instead it is the comfort of the mother. In this I find even less room to move on my position. There is of course the pro-choice illustration where a person awakes in a hospital to find that he is forced to share his kidneys with another human being while he was unconscious. The story is then supposed to show us that the fetus is acting much like an unwanted parasite. But I would suggest that while no person should be forced into helping another human being against their will; it is clearly the moral thing to do and not to help is then immoral. The same is true of a fetus. For example pro-choice activists will often bring up rape as a good reason to allow abortion. The reason is because the baby has been forced upon the women without her consent. At the same time they might make the argument that no one has the right to force anyone else to do anything. The problem comes with the following question: Does that then translate into eye-witnesses of rape? In other words, if I were to witness a rape in progress or see what seems to be the beginning of a rape situation, would I not then be immoral not to attempt to stop it or not to call the police? While it may be immoral to force someone into a moral act, it is still immoral for that person not to comply. It may be immoral for someone to point a gun to my head and make me call the police, but calling the police is still the ethical choice. Likewise, while it may be immoral to force someone to have a child: having the child is remains nonetheless the moral decision.

Abortion: Part 1. When does life begin?

During the time of Socrates he taught that a person did not yet posses a human soul until some time between the ages of 6-9 months (Socrates suggested that males were imparted with a soul at 6 months and females at 9). For Socrates, before this time of “insoulment”, where a soul was imparted to human children thy held in their possession a soul, more or less similar to a plant and then later an animal as the child grew closer to the age of what constituted “full humanity”. Like most people today I would have to disagree with the great Socrates in this case. No such evidence exists today which would make this view viable to any intelligent person. So when does a person become fully human? When is a soul imparted?

In a world where basically everyone I know believes in a “soul” this question can have huge implication on issues such as abortion. In the interest of revealing my own bias, my personal opinion is that a soul can never be separated from a person; that the two are indivisible. I believe that a life has been formed from the first minute of conception. My evidence…as soon as the egg is fertilized, replication of cells begins, the organic organism initiates metabolism, and so life begins. This is, I might add, the dictionary definition of “life” as we know it.

Unlike Socrates and his modern equivalents who suggest that a soul develops much like an early form of puberty, I cannot image a human baby having anything less than a human soul at the instant of its establishment. By our own scientific definition the organism growing within an impregnated woman is alive from the very point of conception. The next question of course is this – what classification of life is this? Is it as Socrates suggested a form of plant life or animal life? It is an interesting question, not because it is difficult but rather because it is so simple to answer. The life growing within a pregnant human being is of course, a human life.