The stuff that nightmares are made of

Materialism and consumption are factors in America's economic downturn, our dependence on foreign oil, global climate change and other environmental issues -- and yet, millions of people rushed out this morning, or last night, to go out and buy more stuff. I join with those who marked Buy Nothing Day today, and in that spirit I suggest that everyone watch this video: The Story of Stuff.

The evil hand

Last night, in his address to the nation from the Oval Office, President Obama said, in his closing paragraph, that "we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day." The irony here is clear and poignant: there is a hand at work in the Gulf oil spill and it is the "invisible hand" of free-market economics. Along with BP's sloppiness and the lack of government oversight, capitalism-as-usual is responsible for the current environmental catastrophe.

Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, lists a number of points where BP could have prevented the oil rig explosion and the spill that followed but instead, each time, the multinational oil conglomerate decided on a course that was cheaper and/or faster. Guess what? That is what companies do. Similar decisions are being made all around the world right now and some of those are hurting people directly, others are hurting the planet. The only thing relevant is the bottom line.

Financial institutions almost destroyed the world economy; health-care providers are bankrupting the nation; oil companies and others have poisoned our air, water, land and food. And our response to all this? We sit here and do nothing about it. Americans seem to be numb to all that is going on around us. Capitalism chugs along, with the same results: the rich get richer, etc.

Tonight on The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart showed video of the last eight presidents, including Obama, saying that the US needs to free itself from dependence on oil, but our appetite has only increased. There is only one way to force people to use less energy: tax it more. Every elected official knows this is the only answer, but no one has the courage to do it. Oil and other fossil fuels have many "hidden costs" and one of those that is now less hidden is the environmental damage and the cost of cleaning that up. The gas tax should be raised significantly to pay for these costs.

It won't be, however, because we have become a nation of spoiled materialists. So the spill keeps spilling, people keep whining but take no action, and the invisible hand keeps sacrificing everything in the name of profit.

This land is NOT your land

Despite Woody Guthrie's wishful thinking, this land -- "from California to the New York island" -- is not mine and it's not yours. It belongs to giant multi-national corporations, who've used America's vast natural resources to make a tiny percentage of the population obscenely wealthy.

Everyone is justifiably outraged by the current spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Obama Administration's frequently muddled response is deserving of criticism as well. Today's New York Times has a story that makes clear that "a hodgepodge of oversight agencies granted exceptions to rules, allowed risks to accumulate and made a disaster more likely on the rig." Most of these regulatory failures at the Deepwater Horizon rig -- owned by Transocean and leased by BP -- took place while Obama has been president, but these missteps are part of a much bigger issue: the overall weakening of government regulation over the past three decades.

While we should all be holding BP's feet to the fire -- insisting that they "make this right" as the company CEO says somberly in a new TV ad that's received widespread criticism -- this whole episode is just one example of the devastation that corporations have wrought upon the planet. Industry has been allowed to remove resources, destroy ecosystems and dump pollutants as governments colluded via campaign contributions and revolving-door jobs -- if not, in some cases, outright bribery. Air, water and land are all filled with the toxic byproducts of unbridled capitalism.

In some places -- the old Soviet Union or today's China, for example -- the average person can only stand by and watch, but in the United States we, the people, are culpable. Americans exercise their will at the ballot box locally, regionally and nationally, and we have a (theoretically) free press and now, the Internet, to provide vast quantities of information. Yet, we sit by and watch as corporations continue to level mountains, denude forests, poison waterways, darken the skies and render lifeless the oceans -- all for profit.

With apologies to Woody: This land is their land, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. This land is here to make them rich.

The big leak

There are, I think, significant differences between Hurricane Katrina's devastation and British Petroleum's catastrophic oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico, but right now those differences are less important than the similarities -- and the key similarity is that many Americans perceive the federal government's reaction to the more recent disaster to be slow and incompetent.

Who can blame them? This is a nightmare and it'll have terrible long-term consequences for the Gulf, the coastal states in that region and the countless animals that will suffer and die because of the spill. BP is attempting to use another maneuver today, but it'll be a while before we know if it works. In the meantime, estimates on the amount of oil released into the Gulf are in the tens of millions of gallons.

Democratic strategist and Louisiana native James Carville slammed the Obama Administration today for its lack of fervor and imagination in response to the spill, and he is right to be angry. The government's reaction has been hesitant and uninspiring. Having said all that, I think it's clear that no one really knows what to do. BP comes up with a different idea every couple of days, but nothing has worked. They were obviously unprepared for something like this.

And there is the crux of this cataclysm. What happened after Katrina was the result of the incompetence and lack of leadership in the Bush Administration. What's happened today in the Gulf is, really, the consequences of 30 years of deregulation, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by the Republicans when they controlled Congress. Corporations act with only the bottom line in mind and it is the job of government to keep them honest.

The regulatory system has clearly failed here -- as it did in the recent coal-mining disaster and as it did in the run-up to the financial crisis. Some of those failures occurred on Obama's watch, and therefore he and his adminsitrati0n are responsible. The time to overhaul the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Minerals Management Service was before the coal-mine explosion and the oil-rig explosion. Yes, there would likely have been a GOP push-back against such reforms without these disasters on the front page, but we elect people to make those hard choices and to do what is best. At this juncture, we've clearly been let down.

Streamlined

Single-stream recycling comes to Boston on July 1, the mayor announced today. We'll no longer have to sort our paper and plastics. More items than ever will be accepted and residents will get 64-gallon buckets to place their recyclables curbside. This should increase the number of people who take part in the recycling program, as well as make it easier for all of us.

Turn off your engines!

Channel 7 did a story on city vehicles left idling for long periods of time, in violation of the law, including a meter maid whose "city car [was] running in East Boston, unattended, while writing parking tickets for an hour."

I believe that leaving a vehicle idling for more than five minutes is subject to a fine, but all of us -- especially city emplyees -- should know better in these times of fiscal and environmental stress.

I'm buying nothing today

While some have been out since before sunrise to scoop up bargains and begin their holiday shopping, I am going to adhere to a small but growing movement that has taken Black Friday and turned it into something smarter and less stressful: Buy Nothing Day.

In the Western World, especially in the Unites States, we consume and throw away an obscene amount of stuff. The Internet video called "The Story of Stuff" does a nice job demonstrating how unsustainable our current path is. Buy Nothing Day attempts to ween us from our corporate-marketing driven impulse to collect more stuff -- of at least the day symbolically highlights the issue at a time when Americans are hitting the malls and commercial sites online.

One of the problems that is currently facing our financial system is that many people in this country are in debt. With our SUVs, plasma TVs, iPods, cell phones and all kinds of other gadgets, we are eating up the planet's resources, poisoning our environment and burying ourselves in debt. On top of that, some people went out and bought houses that they couldn't afford.

As I said, today is symbolic -- so don't shoot me if you see me out getting an espresso (I will not, however, be at any mall, big-box retailer, chain store, etc., for now or the foreseeable future) -- but it's what we do day-to-day and throughout the year that matters. I personally have a number of things I do to live a less throwaway life, but I will let today serve as motivation to do even more.

Update: On Long Island a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by the savage crowd that entered the store at 5 a.m. Meanwhile, in Southern California, two men killed each other when a gun battle broke out in a Toys R Us. Looks like the holiday spirit is upon us.

I saw a woman who had been waiting outside a store since Thursday afternoon the Newshour last night, and she said that her family was angry with her for missing Thanksgiving dinner, but she felt that shopping for bargains was more important. Consumerism has robbed many of us of our humanity.

Heights mess highlighted

The Globe shines a light on a couple of eyesore properties in East Boston today. The GlobeWatch column reports that the lots on either side of 111 Boardman Street are "strewn with old cars and debris or have been used as an illegal parking lot and storage site for construction materials with no intervention from city officials, despite numerous complaints."

Mike Cintolo, a friend of mine who works in the city's Inspectional Services Department, is mentioned in the story. He has apparently spoken with the property owners, who've been warned to clean the mess up or get fined by the city.

Suffolk Downs dumps into local creek

Suffolk Downs is in violation of the Clean Water Act, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The track has apparently been dumping polluted water into a small tributary called Sales Creek -- a discharge that has included animal waste and other contaminated runoff.

Looking at the map, I believe that Sales is the tidal creek that forms part of the border between East Boston and Revere (at Bennington Street) as well as Eastie and Winthrop (at Saratoga Street). The small waterway also appears to run through culverts on the racetrack's infield.

When Sales Creek exits Suffolk -- carrying its animal manure and other waste -- it runs into the Belle Isle salt marsh, protected state reservation land, and then the creek turns and dumps out into the small harbor inlet that separates Logan Airport from Constitution Beach. Does this mean that Suffolk Downs has been polluting the water we've been swimming in for decades?

Clean and green

With the spate of beautiful weather we've had this week, a man's fancy turns to ... spring cleaning? OK, women, grilling and baseball are likely at the top of your list, as they are mine, to finish that sentence, but truth be told, many of us are thinking of those subjects year round (yes, even baseball!).

Anyway, Earth Day was observed earlier this week, and I have been thinking recently about eliminating as many unnecessary, corporate-made consumer goods as possible from my life, especially all types of household cleaners. Before the Second World War people made good with simpler and safer items to do the jobs that we buy all sorts of toxic chemicals to do today.

There are many Internet sites to find information on this topic, and a number of books on the subject as I saw in a bookstore this afternoon, but I came across a brief piece on the 'net tonight that lists the six ingredients you need to do all of your household cleaning. I'm going to try to live by it starting now. How about you?

Planting change

Tomorrow is Earth Day, a celebration held since 1970 to remind us that we all share a single planet, one with finite resources and an ecosystem that is intertwined to levels we don't always understand. In that frame of mind, I highly recommend reading a story from yesterday's New York Times by Michael Pollan, a noted writer on food and the food cycle.

The piece is called "Why Bother?" and that question is applied to efforts by individuals to shrink their so-called "carbon footprints" -- the amount of energy a person uses. The article ends up discussing something that I am planning to do this year: grow some of my own food.

Last year was my first venture in that direction, with a few plum tomato plants on my mom's porch. (She gets more sunlight than I get on my porch.) This year I am going to try to plant a bunch of things in my aunt's yard. I saved up some pumpkin and squash seeds over the winter -- I like to make pies and this year I made most of them from scratch -- and I hope to get some other seeds and to buy some tomato plants.

Now, I am not much of a green thumb and the soil in may aunt's yard looks as though it might present some problems, but I aim to give it a shot. I still need to read a little bit more on gardening, but we'll see what happens. I have low expectations, and if anything grows at all I will deem that a success.