"Garbage : the practical journal for the environment." They ceased publication in 1994,

[jtuck004]

started 1989.

We took a train trip to San Francisco back in the 90's. Wife went to a conference, I walked through some of the Tenderloin, took a bus to the area formerly known as Haight-Ashbury and went to the bookstores and other places. Found this. (One of the coolest bookstores left at the time, but I think it has all been "modernized" by now.

The magazine was about all things, well, Garbage. Anything we threw away, whether out in a can, up in a smokestack, through the walls your home...it looks like, if it involved waste, it might touch on it.

Notice the word "practical" in the heading - the articles many times touched on what one could do about it. For example, this issue (I only bought a couple) had an article about using Greywater - the product of your sink washing to water your compost pile or other growing beds, instead of wasting it down the sewer.

In the world of the bubble we are surrounded by, I grow garlic and a few other things, and I think about all the learning these people are going to need to do to survive the future they are building for all of us.

As I was leafing through this, not listening to that voice in my ear telling me I need to clean this mess up, (I thought she had already gone to bed), I think we will be going back to the old issues of these, learning, maybe re-learning, and putting into practice the things Jimmy Carter suggested we might do to keep ourselves secure, strong, and prosperous. Things like grey water, or wearing sweaters, to avoid our nation sliding into a country which mostly rewards the very few.

The magazine ceased publication in 1994, it looks like:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/garbage-the-practical-journal-for-the-environment/oclc/19744968

This was interesting - in the listing it states :
Refuse and refuse disposal -- Citizen participation -- Periodicals.
Environmental protection -- Citizen participation -- Periodicals.

Citizen participation? In stopping the waste that is making the planet unlivable? The magazine isn't published any longer, and and a lot of people quit talking about those ideas.

Maybe it's time to work a little harder on something that marries the stopping of waste with citizen participation.

Because with all our other problems, we need to stop purposely destroying the ground we stand on, because those with the least are going to suffer the worst. And that will cost all of us.

[hunter]

1. Don't buy stuff that will turn into garbage.

Gasoline in your car, the rubber that wears off your tires, and eventually the entire car itself turns into garbage, contaminating the air, water and soil.

When I buy locally grown fruits and vegetables, unwrapped, the peels go into our compost heap and are turned into fertilizer for our soil. Not garbage.

In our city the water that goes into the sewer is recycled. This process is partly powered by solar energy and the methane produced in the sewage treatment process, but it also uses utility electricity generated by fracked natural gas. Fracking is garbage.

What we call "economic productivity" these days is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the natural environment and the human spirit.

We need to figure out how to provide everyone with good food, clean water, secure comfortable homes, appropriate medical care, birth control, and education, and then just chill out, leaving maybe a gentle twenty hour work week for everyone, rather than sixty and eighty hour works weeks for some, and no work, or abusive underpaid work and poverty for others. Our various cultural "work ethics" and "consumer society" are killing us.

If we were truly intelligent beings we would shut down the fossil fuel industry and build an economy that doesn't need them, without abandoning anyone in the process.

Sure, a lot of people would lose their familiar jobs, but we all end up with a better life, not the deteriorating environments and great disparities of wealth we suffer now.

[jtuck004]

2. "but we all end up with a better life, not the deteriorating environments..." < The

best reasons for doing this.