I'm nearing sixty (!!!! HOW????) and realizing that my bits and pieces of beginnings are destined to damnation if I don't let them out. They're either seedlings or dying leaves--I don't know if they're meant to thrive or decompose--but each represents a moment that mattered to me. For that reason alone, I'm opening this window and tossing them to the wind.
The slideshow below is their way into the world, whether seen or unseen. (If you're on a phone, you'll have to turn it sideways.) Longer starts are below the slideshow--they're mostly musings and ramblings, but they bring to mind something I felt strongly at the time, so they too are being released from a more certain doom..
The slideshow below is their way into the world, whether seen or unseen. (If you're on a phone, you'll have to turn it sideways.) Longer starts are below the slideshow--they're mostly musings and ramblings, but they bring to mind something I felt strongly at the time, so they too are being released from a more certain doom..
Longer Beginnings (and Outdated Almost-Dones)
On the criticism of Boyan Slat
I'm reading a story in The New Yorker about Boyan Slat, the idealist young inventor who came up with a mechanism for cleaning the Pacific Gyre--or so he had hoped; to my surprise, he's been quite heavily criticized.
What bothers me most about the criticism aimed at Slats--whose response, exceptionally savvy for his 22 years, is to embrace it as free consultations that have shaped his designs--is that they came from within the environmentalist collective.Though I can appreciate environmentalists' concerns that his contraption will ensnare surface creatures, it's obvious those creatures are already ensnared by toxic trash. I'm particularly bothered by the argument that his efforts to clean up are distracting from efforts to prevent plastic's presence in the first place. This doesn't make sense to me. If my kids were to litter, we'd have an anti-litter talk, but I'd most definitely make them pick up whatever they dropped. Prevention and cleanup are both good things, each having immediate and long-term respective results. The claim that throwing out the trash in the Pacific Gyre somehow puts animals and prevention ideas at risk seems short-signed, even egoic and greedy, to me.
In the legendary words of an accidental activist, "Why can't we just all get along?" As with all infighting and splintering of all causes--religious, political, sociocultural, etc.--the whole is weakened by the fractures within. Why we must we pick on each other? The enemy of my enemy is my friend, is s/he not? and far more will be accomplished by collaborating than by differentiating. It strikes me as a fight for bragging rights and available funding--usually intertwined motives: whoever gets the most money, wins. But it's the earth who needs a win, not any individual or organization. Frankly, these criticism seem borne of jealous strategizing.
While "good intentions" should not excuse anyone's actions from examination and constructive feedback, in this case, as in so many in so many causes, there is no criticism that justifies thet damage done to The Cause--here, the dire one of the Gyre, acres of plastic refuse in the ocean, the dangerous, ugly effect of unethical actions. Critics may or may not have good points, and those can be well taken and applied to improve efforts, but not to abandon them. That would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Or, in this case, to feed the plastic monster in the seawater.