Past Time for a Precautionary

For the past three days I have been wearing a weary path from the den sofa to the bathroom to the bedroom.  Yesterday, Dearly Beloved took over the other sofa.

Thank goodness for two sofas and two bathrooms.

Bathing, dressing, even eating have been scratched from any To Do list during this time.  Didn’t want to hold a book and couldn’t concentrate enough to knit.   I’ve done little except watch the last episode of Monk (Oh, Adrian, I’ll miss you so!) and read a little online,  the only way I could find any real news.  My throat was too sore to have Tiger Woods and the White House dinner crashers crammed down it any longer.

This morning I read some of the international news articles about the  Copenhagen Climate Conference. The perspectives of some of the 192 participating countries are understandably different even without politics rearing its ever-present head.  Throwing a monkey wrench into the discussions is the controversy over newly discovered e-mails that some scientists attempted to skew some of the findings.

Some religious groups claim to take no position so as not to appear to worship nature, while others say nature is where they find God. How about issues like economics and birth control…?   To what degree have they influenced opinions?

Kermit was right;  it’s not easy being green.

The President’s change of arrival date at the conference has brought about renewed optimism for meaningful change in some circles, while others dismissed  it as a photo op.  Even if the latter is true, it would be the first such photo op of a sitting US President since 1992.   Can’t hurt, could help.

In our family by-laws, we include the Precautionary Rule.  Whenever we are going anywhere…even if we don’t have to…we go to the bathroom:  the Precautionary Pit Stop.  If one of us has a cold, the other starts Vitamin C.  Precautionary.  It seems to me that even the folks who don’t believe in global warming should at least take a look at the data:  an Environmental Precautionary, so to speak.   And yes, the data must be truthful to have any meaningful influence.

City officials in Copenhagen, where prostitution is legal, put out cards in hotels advising, “Be sustainable.  Don’t buy sex.”  In protest, Danish sex workers announced they will offer free sex.

Hmmm.  Factor in unintended consequences.

My view is simplistic:  trashing something causes damage, whether it’s land, water, or air.  (I’m speaking of the environment, not prostitution.)   As Aunt Bee Taylor put it, “Opie, you haven’t finished your milk.  We can’t put it back in the cow, you know.”

Now, in an attempt to leave no one unoffended (I’ll blame it all on my delirious state) I offer, to Dearly Beloved’s horror,  this commercial message from Greenpeace.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin