The Dilemma of Our Time

[This piece was written August 14, 2007]

The Dilemma of our time: waste water, or waste wood.

I live in Southern California, where there is neither water, nor much wood to speak of. It is, after all, a desert climate. Furthermore, this year brought the lowest rainfall on record in Los Angeles. On the other hand, while the real water crisis lies about twenty years into the future, the air and climate change are finally IMMEDIATE concerns, and figuring highly in the climate change picture is deforestation. Now, I am currently in San Francisco, which is a city on the southern edge of an enormous forested region which a ways up the coast is the only temperate rain forest on earth. I’m in a coffee shop in the ‘tenderloin’, a district of the city I have never before heard of, although I am a frequent visitor to the city. It is, as I believe many Americans would agree, the most beautiful metropolis in the country, and at the very least rivals, if not exceeds easily, Montreal for most beautiful on the continent, and is just one more reason we shouldn’t turn Northern California into Lebanon which hasn’t seen her legendary cedars in millennia. Another is that every new inch of old growth forest we consume is meaningful, and in a city with so much wood nearby it might be worthwhile to consume with a special conscience toward not using disposable wood products, like toothpicks. Such is the well balanced dilemma in which I find myself; do I use a metal spoon, dirtying it so it will have to be washed in running fresh water; or do I use one of those flimsy wooden stirring things (in an aside, does anyone remember the Ducktails episode where the sawmill grinds down whole pine trees into single toothpicks?) which perpetuates an ‘it doesn’t matter’ attitude in a place that actually has an impact on the supply and certainly, therefore, the usage of such violent products? I took the wood thingy, I figured I might stir another lump of sugar into another tea later, or I could chew on the thing and punch my gums a bit in a bid to stimulate good oral hygiene.