Smiling Faces and "Caret" Motives

Now that things appear to have changed for the better in this country, we may be expected to pick up the pace. I am talking about walking instead of driving, taking the stairs and not the elevator, drying clothes on the line, growing our own vegetables; i.e., we must be about the business of making our lives more "green." Does all of this carbon offsetting sound like a lot of work? You bet.



...Alice looked around her in great surprise. "Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!"
"Of course it is," said the Queen. "What would you have it?"
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"



--from Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter II, "The Garden of Live Flowers," by Lewis Carroll--



On our recent trip to visit family in distant homes, we stopped on the way back to our home at a National Seashore site and wildlife refuge near Cape Canaveral. The alligator pictured above immediately attracted our attention, even though it never appeared to move at all. It might seem a little strange for wildlife to be sheltered so near a site laden with TCE (trichloroethylene) and its degradation products such as vinyl chloride. Hubby has been to the Cape before but not as a tourist. He once tracked contaminant plumes in the soil and groundwater there.

"Rockets' red glare" is still seen here occasionally when the shuttle blasts off into space. We may not be in a race with the Russians anymore, but there is much more work to be done in space. Since the economy is in such a meltdown, I wonder where the money will come from to pay for this work?

This building (above) looks a little like a condominium, but it serves a more important purpose than fattening the bank accounts of developers. Can you guess what it is?

We found another building with a lot of history as well as significance for the future close to home. The National Naval Aviation Museum has become a major tourist attraction for NW Florida and serves an important purpose in educating people about naval aviation. Admission is free, so it's a good place to take a large group. Children seem especially impressed with the vast collection of carefully disassembled, restored, and reassembled aircraft and aviation memorabilia.

This type of green-washing would never work for our daughter. Even with a low-flow showerhead, she consumes more water than you would think humanly possible. I wish I could somehow rig up a mandatory one-rain-barrel shower for her. Initiatives seldom seem to work with some consumers, but carefully enforced mandates just might do the trick.

I know these objects are just carets. You know, ^^, empty, lacking things like engines or people to make them fly.

Only imagination can truly take flight in this place. And it does, even for earthbound bloggers who like to walk and then write.

It takes a very large prop to move a ship, and, it appears, even larger props like "carbon offsets" and "RECs" (renewable energy credits) to move a movement. Empty of meaning or purpose, except maybe to enrich some savvy business owners--oops, I mean directors and stakeholders of nonprofit organizations--they have become the watchwords for a new generation of green optimists.