Down The Sewer Pipe – Politically Speaking

In the past twenty years or so Environmentalism has become a rather hot topic.  Pressure is brought to bear on those whom are elected to public office to be “green”.  Odd effects are or can be produced in the area of public policy and by extension public practice. Small towns and large cities are coerced into using public policy to guarantee private companies an income. 

Recycling in Oregon is a billions a dollar a year business as it is, yet collections are forced when it should be free and people given the liberty not to recycle if they chose not to.  That would be the Constitutional thing to do but Environmentalism is not about the Constitution, it is very much about the money.  Green to the environmental groups means big bucks and they are out to grab as much as they can.  Think about it, you pay for the collection and they make money on what they collect.  Portland Oregon even guarantees areas of collections to the various companies that collect recyclables.  Recycling at the force of government enabling business to collect prior and after collection.  Rather like a stockbroker but there isn’t a chance that they will pay you any money.

We did recycling prior to the bottle bill and depending on the size of bottle one could receive five cents, ten cents, or fifteen cents for the bottle return.  Then the fabulous mental “giants” in the Oregon State legislature made the health laws for bottle reuse harder to follow.  Resulting in bottles no longer being re-sterilized so people just threw them away.  If Oregon were really on the forefront of the environmental movement we would be going back to reusing bottles instead of re-smelting them and making another glass thing.

Consider what a foolish thing it was that the elected state legislative mental giants did in the late nineteen seventies.  Heating with a house with wood was judged to be bad, bad for health and bad for the environment.  A lot of us said “look a t the idiots in Salem, their heads are full of sand”.  But they shot back that heating with electricity or gas was far better and had the Thousand Friends of Oregon, The Sierra club, and a bunch of other “earth first” groups to back them up.  Fast-forward to the year two thousand seven and the governor signs an “environmental bill” that in essence says heating with gas or electric is bad while heating with wood is good.  Backed, incidentally, by the very same groups that thirty years ago said heating with wood is bad for everybody including the earth.

The moral of this story is to be very weary of fads when crafting legislation as in the long run your legacy may prove to be a very bad move.  For what it is worth I was one of those people that wrote letters to the editor and my state representatives stating how misguided they were.  History proves me correct and leads me to wonder how it is that when really smart people are elected to public offices they suddenly behave like they are hit by a “stupid stick”?

Sherman