Knoxville —
I was pretty down last time I wrote here. I was down on our chances of waking up soon enough to save ourselves from the dire effects of that climate change we seem to have caused. All our wonderful industrial inventions have brought the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere up 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, and we’re getting record rain, drought, fires, tornadoes, and other nasty weather.
Well, listen up. I’m going to focus this week on what we are doing now to help earth move back to a healthier regime.
You know the junction of Highway 92 and Highway 5 south of Pleasantville? It used to be an ordinary crossroads where occasional cars might park (probably illegally) so drivers could share a ride. Well, a few years ago our tax dollars created a large parking lot there.
Why? So cars could park there and car pool to other places. I’ve seen as many as 20 cars parked there! One of us should do the arithmetic to find how many million gallons of gas – and dollars – that has saved.
There are some astounding statistics. For instance, a single one of those strange-looking cylindrical light bulbs, compared to our old-fashioned standard bulb, saves a ton of coal over its lifetime, and dollars, too. Many of us are doing that, and new rules will have all of us doing it soon.
But here’s the story I like most. I’ve shopped at HyVee in Knoxville a long time. Some years ago I started asking the manager for toilet paper made from recycled paper. I could get it at Dahl’s in Des Moines (their “Green Forest” brand claims that if every household in our country would substitute one package of Green Forest toilet tissue from recycled paper for one 12-roll package of regular toilet paper we would save 5,638,800 trees).
But Dahl’s is in Des Moines and I live here. Lots of gas miles in between, so I kept requesting at HyVee. And – guess what?
A few years ago HyVee here started carrying a wonderful product made from 100 percent recycled paper. First in Knoxville, I believe.
It’s called “Marcal: Small Steps” and is available in paper towels and napkins, too. Marcal provides another astounding statistic: every 17 trees help earth absorb 250 pounds of carbon annually.
If we say Knoxville has 8,000 people (not even counting me eight miles away) and they used only that 100 percent recycled toilet paper for one year, some 3,400 trees could be saved! (We save even more by carting all our old newspaper, junk mail, flyers, etc. into Knoxville Recycling.)
Did you ever think that your choice of toilet paper might help the earth get back on course? Yes, we’ll have to do a lot more than use the right toilet paper to give our grandkids a safer planet, but more and more we are taking these “small steps.”
Hurray for us, we’ve started. The record-breaking fires in the Southwest are still burning, but at least maybe we are beginning to wake up to the need – and the part we can play – to help get our earth back in balance.
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