Crunch All You Want... We'll Make More!

Earth Day was last Thursday. Not that you'd really notice considering Mother Nature decided to take a turn for the worse... Saturday night we had 5" of snow fall all over the fresh spring blossoms. The sight of brilliant pinks, reds, purples, yellows, and greens contrasted with the stark white of the snow was definitely a beautiful, rare event.

This evening I made my way down to the new "Town Center at Levis Commons" down in Perrysburg.



As you can see, the idea is to make the shopping plaza feel like a small town's main street. You can park your car right on main street and visit all your favorite shops.

All the shops are crafted with facades to look just like the buildings you would find in a small town. Talbot's here even has a church steeple. (I wonder if their pews are comfortable) What is so disturbing about this place is its location. Levis commons is built out in the middle of a bunch of farm fields, only two miles from downtown Perrysburg, a place with all the charm of this artificial city center. It is only four miles from downtown Maumee, another small town with a lot of charm. Both of these small towns on the outskirts of Toledo could have used an influx of commercial development into their downtowns. But instead of reviving the real thing, these developers and entrepreneurs chose to build anew.

I sometimes wonder what is it with our culture and mindset that we so readily discard anything old in favor of all that is new. Why must we tear down a building after 20-40 years instead of renovation? Why do we build more places to shop when other shopping center sit vacant? Why do we build new schools instead of saving the ones we already have? Is it really easier to throw something away a buy anew than to fix it up?

I started thinking of my printer. It's an Epson, and a few years old. Right now the replacement ink costs more than to buy a new, better printer with the ink included! And if this one had something go wrong, buying a new one would cost less than having it repaired.

We live in a disposable society. We buy plastic forks, use them once, then throw them away. When dessert comes, we grab another plastic fork and then throw that one away too. We waste, we consume, but we don't conserve.

As I filled up my tank at the gas station, conveniently located across the street, I spent almost $30 for gas. The prices keep rising because our supply of oil is dwindling. ...the day will come when our supply of, land, fresh water, and food will also dwindle. Will we change our habits then?

Our sermon last Sunday was one of the most powerful and moving I have ever heard, (a friend of mine has a summary of it in her post "Electricity"). Our rector included some of the lines from "If the world were a village of 100 people." Some of the lines that struck me were...

"Of the wealth in this village, 6 people own 59% (all of them from the United States)"

Meanwhile...
20 are undernourished
1 is dying of starvation
20 have no clean, safe water to drink.

Is it not enough that we have so much while others have so little that we have to waste what we do have? Right now I am just overwhelmed by the amount of waste I see everywhere, trying to come to grips with the abhorable notion that I'm a participant too. And I really don't like that...