TorontoSun.com - Other News - Doing your part to save the planet seems a whole lot easier if you're a celebrity. Or a heavy drinker. Fri, June 1, 2007
Doing your part to save the planet seems a whole lot easier if you're a celebrity. Or a heavy drinker.
By MARK BONOKOSKI
"We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."
-- Albert Einstein
The Governator, green in celebrity, has now come and gone, leaving the message that the collective "we" can renew our planet's climate.
Before Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was pop rocker Sheryl Crow, once engaged to eco-friendly Tour de France pedaller Lance Armstrong, who had been putting the chill to global warming by using her now-completed tour of U.S. colleges to engage young minds into thinking of easy ways to leave a smaller environmental footprint, the latest catchphrase for living green.
One of her ideas, posted on her blog, was to limit the use of toilet paper to one square of tissue per lavatory visit.
Agence France-Presse picked up on that story PDQ, and blew it around the world in a cybersecond, forcing Ms. Crow to explain to the gullible the next day that she was only joking.
Thank God for that.
Trust me, it is not as easy as it sounds.
BIO BUS
Sheryl Crow had been travelling the campus circuit in her de rigeur bio-diesel bus with global warming activist Laurie David, who was also the producer of the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the now-ubiquitous documentary film based on former U.S. vice-president Al Gore's supposed 30 years of research into greenhouse gases.
And, leading up to April's Earth Day celebrations, Sheryl Crow and Laurie David appeared to be in 100 places at once -- spreading the message on every medium possible.
This, of course, was good -- just as it is good that Ms. Crow recently became an adoptive mother, another celebrity in-thing.
The Einstein quote attributed atop this column, by the by, was lifted off Ms. David's blog, thereby employing at least two of the four Rs proposed by Environment Canada -- reuse, and recycle.
Save the world. Pass it on.
It was while lugging a collection of empty wine bottles to the beer store the other day -- all to save the world and reclaim the deposit foisted upon us by the Liberal government of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty -- that I happened to hear a public service announcement on the radio about Alcoholics Anonymous.
And, because a columnist's mind is always in gear, it crossed this one's mind that AA is probably one of the least-recognized environmental groups on the entire planet. This comes at the heels of Toronto Mayor David Miller's recent whine that Toronto stands to lose millions of dollars to the new provincial deposit-return program for wine and liquor bottles because there will be less blue box content to sell to the glass market.
After analyzing just two months into the returns program, Toronto's acting manager of solid waste management, Geoff Rathbone, declared there was already a 50% to 80% drop in the amount of glass tonnage collected by the city.
Imagine, however, the tonnage that would have been lost if all those alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous were still drinking, and had been contributing like saints to the blue box program? The city would have to file for bankruptcy.
And imagine, too, how high the landfill would have been if those same AAs were still drinking at a time prior to the blue box's invention?
All this might seem quite ludicrous, of course, but, then again, Sheryl Crow had to return to her blog to tell her audience that she was only kidding about using one square of toilet tissue per lavatory visit after Agence France-Presse had the hip people of the world literally bending over backwards as they attempted to follow the singer's suggestion.
115,000 MEMBERS
Because it has never kept formal membership lists, mainly because anonymity is sacrosanct, Alcoholic Anonymous' head office out of New York estimates on its web site that there are nearly 6,500 registered AA groups in Canada, with approximately 115,000 members. Because of the anonymity factor, however, it could be double that.
In the GTA, according to the head office here, there are at least 15,000 active AA members who, if one entertains the premise of them suddenly going back on the grog, would unquestionably be stretching the returns section at the beer stores to their limit, or filling the landfill sites to capacity with their oft-secretive daily consumption of wine and spirits.
These numbers, therefore, are numbers that cannot be ignored, especially when no Einstein is needed to indicate their economic and environmental impacts are far from insignificant. Yet, ignored they seem to be.
A few weeks ago, for example, this newspaper asked our federal leaders what they are doing in their personal lives to leave a smaller environmental footprint. This, of course, was before Ontario Environment Minister Laurel Broten suggested we all flick off.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his environment minister, John Baird, refused to play along with the Sun survey -- shame on them -- but the rest of them did, with Liberal leader Stephane Dion, the NDP's Jack Layton, and the Green party's Elizabeth May getting high marks from the Sierra Club of Canada for their commitment to reducing greenhouse gases.
All three, believe it or not, claim they actually turn off the bathroom tap while brushing their teeth, undoubtedly brushing with eco-friendly baking soda, one can only presume.
And all three, of course, recycle their glass, although the type of glass they recycle was never broken down.
Did some of that glass -- most of it? -- come with California vineyard labels, as was being pressed this week by Arnold Schwarzenegger? And, if they did, were they returned for refund, or relegated to the blue box to assist their respective city's bottom line? These questions were never asked nor therefore answered.
Elizabeth May also said the only paper in her entire house is toilet paper, and that it is 100% recycled. She did not say, however, if it was also reused. Or if she used only one square at a time.
It's tough questions such as these that most often never get asked.
