It starts with me

Like everybody else, I get overwhelmed by the world sometimes. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is: the world doesn't accord with it, and as a result, it's going to pot, or to seed, or to hell.

A lot of the problems we face will force us to make decisions about how we direct large amounts of money and time, and it's proper that those decisions be hammered out in public debate about what our government should or should not be doing.

However, we residents of the U.S. need to look a lot harder at the decisions we make at the individual level as well.

Do you think about how you live your life? Do you think about whether you could live it in a way that is less costly, both to yourself and to society at large?

Here's a trivial example of behavior that bothers me by its lack of reflection. Alton Brown, a Food Network personality, frequently recommends using large amounts of aluminum foil for convenience while cooking. The food-stained foil can be thrown out at the end of the cooking process, saving you the trouble of washing up another pan or sheet.

Alton, that's a nice consideration if you're coping with a water shortage. But have you ever considered that it takes a lot of energy to mine that aluminum? That the aluminum doesn't break down quickly in the landfill, and therefore can be considered unrecoverable in ours and our children's and our children's children's lifetimes?

We produce and we consume, but we don't have a closed cycle for most of our manufactured goods. What we dispose of is effectively lost to our civilization forever.

Consider that in nature, nothing is lost. Dead plant life is broken down and nutrients restored to the soil for other plants to use. Dead animals feed bacteria and insects and sometimes larger scavenger animals. Rock is eroded or melted, eventually to become rock again.

The waste byproducts of what we consume, by contrast, have a limited future of repurposing at best. Plastic bottles can be shredded to produce carpeting, we are told. That's nice, but what happens to the carpeting at the end of its useful lifetime?

Even those things we can recycle more or less endlessly can fall victim to our laziness or our failure to establish clear routes for recycling. You can't recycle a glass bottle or an aluminum can if it winds up in the landfill because you tossed it in the garbage can rather than finding a recycling bin.

Fixing this problem will require rethinking our entire way of life; it's a massive problem that will require a massive effort and it will involve government (sorry, libertarians). Until we find the intelligence and the will to make this effort, the best we can do is to rethink how each of us lives. Little decisions can have a big effect if enough of us make them.

Thomas Friedman wrote a column that sums up where we are and where we need to go.