Green Guilt

So I confess that I switched back to Lysol.  For months, I had been struggling with an eco-friendly biodegradable toilet cleaner by Seventh Generation, but the unfortunate line of grey scum in my loo just wouldn't go away.  Enter the bleach, exit the scum.  Problem solved, apart from the agent of doom environmental guilt of course.

Generally, I consider myself to be an averagely responsible consumer where it comes to the green lifestyle.  I recycle religiously.  I compost occasionally.  I own a vast number of shopping totes and reusable water bottles, and remember to take them with me at least 75% of the time.  But I'm pretty much over what the Wall Street Journal christened the Pampered Countertop of products...the Mrs Meyers, Method Home, Seventh Generation stuff which looks pretty and smells great but does a fairly lousy job of actually cleaning anything.  I mean the hand soap is fairly harmless.  But have you tried Mrs Meyer's Lemon Verbena shower cleaner?  You need a real cleaning product at hand to wipe off the streaks and cut through the limescale deposits.  So you end up cleaning twice!

It was such a relief to discover that I was not alone in my disdain for some of these products, and that folk around the country are having a hard time adapting to the filmy deposit which new eco dishwasher detergents leave on their glasses and dishes.  As one savvy consumer put it, if you have to wash the dishes again (either before or after they've been through the dishwasher), then surely the excess water consumption is nearly as environmentally unsound as the phosphates in the old sudsy detergents were in the first place?

The problem with my argument is of course, that while my little piece of pollution is just a drop in the world's mop and bucket, if you add all the other polluters, it suddenly becomes more serious.  And if you scale up my argument to a bigger issue, it just doesn't work at all.

Take, for example, uranium mining at the Grand Canyon.  Two years ago, the Secretary of the Interior placed a moratorium on new mining claims within 1 million acres around the Canyon.  But that period is about to expire, and public comment is sought  by April 4th as to which of four proposals the Bureau of Land Management should adopt with regards to mining in the vicinity of the Canyon.  Let's make this easy.  The Colorado river supplies drinking water to some 25 million Americans.  Uranium contaminated drinking water, anyone?  I don't think it's necessary to refer to recent events in Japan to make this point any clearer. 

Should you need any further convincing on this subject, then I encourage you to visit the Grand Canyon Trust's website, which has additional cogent reasons for supporting Alternative B (which would ban all new uranium mining claims within public land watersheds that drain directly into Grand Canyon National Park), and has convenient links to the relevant reports, as well as the e-mail address where you can comment.

Here endeth the lesson.  Because I know that the above two paragraphs sounded just a tad preachy.  Which is ironic, given where I started.  I guess I'm just a conflicted green contender - eager to tell others how to clean up their act, before I have my own house in order. 

Why no Brouhaha?

Is anyone apart from me surprised at the lack of hullabaloo surrounding the Deutsche Borse acquisition of the New York Stock Exchange?  NYSE, surely, is one of America's most storied institutions - having been founded in 1792, when the fledgling Republic was not yet two decades old.  Some of you will remember the massive kerfuffle which occurred thirty years ago when the Japanese bought the Rockefeller Center in New York.  Or what about the Dubai Ports scandal back in 2006?  That was an issue of national security!

But turning over the largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization to the Germans doesn't seem to pose any problem at all.  Even Chuck Schumer, a severe critic of the Dubai deal (which ultimately failed), has given Deutsche Borse his blessing, insisting only that the merged company have the words New York somewhere in its name.  Has America's financial capital come to this?

Time was that the stock exchange was seen as a viable measure of the strength of our economy.  Periods of strong stock market performance often coincided with low unemployment - the Eighties spring to mind.  But as Felix Salmon argues convincingly in Wall Street's Dead End, the stock market is becoming increasingly irrelevant.  Two of the most innovative American companies to launch in the last decade, Facebook and Twitter, have chosen to bypass it entirely.  They are valued at $50 billion and somewhere near $10 billion respectively, but have chosen to raise money privately, leaving them free to develop without the pesky interference of shareholders.

Don't get me wrong.  It's not that I have anything particularly against the Germans.  Neither am I reflexively against foreign ownership of U.S. companies.  We buy stuff overseas.  It's only natural that strong companies abroad would be interested in owning a piece of the world's number one economy, and being able to tap into its freespending customer base.  But I guess I was under the mistaken impression that our primary stock exchange was sacrosanct.  It makes you wonder what's next.  Will the Mint start printing money in China because it's more cost effective?  Will the White House be sold to the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and leased back to the President for use? (You may mock, but that group controls 75% of the Chrysler Building).

I can't help feeling that America in 2011 is a bit like Britain in 1945. This is the beginning of the end of an empire.

The Changing Face of Friendship

In 1993, a British anthropologist called Robin Dunbar posited that there is a natural limit to the number of friends one can reasonably sustain, and put the number at approximately 150.  How could he anticipate the Facebook phenomenon, where many of the folks I know are already over 200, and one has over 1000 "friends"?

My own count is still below the so-called Dunbar number, but what strikes me more is the weird lens which social media provides into the lives of folks I don't really know that well.  There's no question that some people are status update addicts, obsessively posting something about their day to day lives, interesting or not.  Then there are the voyeurs, folks whose presence online is confirmed by their profile icon appearing on the left of my screen, but whose posts are rare (and usually, quite worthwhile).  And then, of course, are the vast swathes of souls who joined Facebook because someone pestered them to, and who have now given up, because they got bored of the drivel, or more likely, are busy living their real lives off line.

This creates a weird dichotomy.  I'm often more familiar with some random acquaintance's travel plans than I am with my best friend's pregnancy.  I discovered this week by telephone that another close friend's marriage could be disintegrating,  but that this disheartening situation had been going on over a month.  Meantime, thanks to Facebook, I am bang up-to-date on what a friend of a friend made for dinner last night.  Odd, and occasionally unsettling.

As of this month, I am back in touch with two schoolfriends who had happily lived out the 20 years since we graduated with nary a word.  Interesting to find out where life took them, yes.  On my list to visit during my trip to Britain in March - not likely.

And real world friendships seem to have changed somewhat too.  Partly, in my case, this is a function of distance.  Having settled some 6,000 miles and 8 hours behind the land where I was born throws up some barriers for the people in Blighty.  And even the east coasters have to count backwards by three to figure out what time I'm on.  But the truth is that really it's a matter of how much effort each friend puts into the relationship.  Friends in Sydney and Tajikistan have done a splendid job of staying in touch despite much greater geographical and time lag distances (perhaps because like me, they are operating in a less friend-rich local environment). 

So come on people, pick up the phone!  And if you don't already have Skype, then get with the picture (literally - the video function is really fun).   Put the coffee pot on, or pour out your cocktail (after all, it's definitely five o'clock somewhere), and get ready for a good, long, old fashioned gossip.