What did you do yesterday?  How about the day before that?  For that matter, do you remember what you had for breakfast this morning?  Memory can be a pretty tricky thing, don’t you think?

Do you remember last weekend?  Felix Baumgartner dropped from outer space and landed safely on earth.  Watch baseball?  Cal Ripken played in 2,632 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles.  His first was in 1982.  We just landed a remote rover on the surface of Mars.  Our first shot at the moon was the remote satellite Ranger 3, which missed by 22,000 miles.  That was in 1962.

Some of us have been around to see many of these things.  Saw a thing on YouTube the other day about a guy on a game show who was in the theater the night Lincoln was shot.  Here in Virginia you may run into Harrison Tyler.  His grandfather, John Tyler, was the 10^th President, serving before Lincoln.  History can also be a pretty tricky thing.

And what if you were able to witness a few centuries of history?

There is a stand of trees in Utah called “Pando.”  They are called “quaking aspen,” and reproduce through a process called “clonal propogation.”  A small shoot will take off from the main root system, and when it gets far enough away it grows skyward, effectively making a new tree.  The average age of a quaking aspen is about 80 years, which is pretty good in tree years, and the grove is about 47,000 trees spread out across a little over 100 acres.  But here’s where it gets really tricky:

Because the trees are all connected by a single root system, they are basically one big organism.  And by using clonal propogation, they can continue to thrive after things like drought and forest fire.  So conservative estimates put the age of this grove at about 80,000 years.  They have been here since the wooly mammoth and saber-toothed cats.  They’ve been here, in fact, longer than humans.

And then there’s the Bristlecone pine, considered to be the oldest individual living organism.  They grow in five or six Western states, and are, quite honestly, not much to look at.  At first glance, they seem kind of dead, but the leaves alone can hang on for decades.  Scientists started taking core samples in the 1950’s, allowing them to count the rings and date the trees without killing them.  They found trees that were 800 years old, 1,000 years old, and dating to the birth of Christ.  That’s pretty old.  In 1964, an intrepid young researcher decided to find the oldest among the bristlecone pines, and systematically began taking samples of all of the trees.  He found many that were older than the previous records, and then his coring tool broke.  He whipped out a saw and cut down the gnarliest bristlecone he could find, and started counting rings.  He counted 4,862, making it the oldest living thing ever on record.

And he had just killed it.

The tree that he lopped down was called Prometheus, named after the Greek god.  The oldest bristlecone known to man is now Methuselah, a sprightly 4,844 years young.  This is a tree that has been here for the birth of America, the painting of the Mona Lisa, the construction of the Coliseum, and the dream of the Great Pyramids.  It’s seen a lot.

We have our fair share of old trees here in Virginia.  There has been a great deal of discussion around the Commonwealth lately about Stadium Woods on the Virginia Tech campus.  These are old growth white oaks that are as old as 250 years.  That’s not as old as Methuselah, but still pretty old.  They are in danger due to plans to build an athletic facility on the Tech campus.  And once you cut them down they won’t see any more history.

One of the keys to Keep Virginia Beautiful is a respect for what we have.  We’re not void of problems, but we have a beautiful state.  Richmond was recently voted the Best River City in America.  We have amazing beaches in Tidewater and along the Atlantic coast.  The Shenandoah Valley has become a tourist draw with people coming from around the country to experience the family farms and vineyards that call it home.  Mountains, valleys, streams and rivers; we have it all.

Lets hang on to it for a while.

Virginia has a pretty wide and varied number of public festivals and events every year.  There are wine festivals, Earth Day events, and music events like Floyd Fest.  Sometimes they promote Virginia products or regions, and sometimes they benefit a specific group, like our friends at Earth Korps and their Belgravia Beer and Wine Festival.  One thing that they all have in common is that they’re fun.

The City of Richmond had its own this past weekend, and over 200,000 people joined in the revelry.  We were overjoyed to attend and play a small part in the Richmond Folk Festival.

Our Capital city was the host to the National Folk Festival for several years, and when they pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 2007, Richmond decided to continue what was becoming a pretty successful gig.  Over 30 groups performed on seven stages over the course of 2 ½ days.  Bands of musicians and dancers from around the world entertained as merchants peddled crafts, served up delicious regional and ethnic foods, and demonstrations highlighted folklife and arts.

Here’s where we pitched in:

We were able to partner with MeadWestvaco and the Richmond Clean City Commission to purchase 100 recycling carts.  The City of Richmond keeps these carts in storage and are at the ready to pull them out for any and all events held within the City.  We were able to pull out all of these carts and distribute them throughout the Richmond Folk Festival.  The Folk Festival had a Green Team that worked throughout the event and kept everything tidy.  You couldn’t miss the hundreds of volunteers in their green t-shirts and in addition to picking up trash and keeping things neat, they physically sorted through trash to make sure that everything that could be recycled was recycled.  The Folk Festival, Venture Richmond and the Richmond Green Events Committee go to great lengths to make sure that this event has as small a footprint as possible. 

As you can imagine, a festival attended by 200,000 people will generate a great deal of trash, and much of that can be recycled.  We were plenty pleased to see so many attendees make good use of the bins, and they were emptied continuously over the course of the weekend.  We also placed almost 30 cigarette receptacles across the grounds, and they certainly went to good use.  We handed out over 2,000 pocket ashtrays (they were almost as big a hit as Rosanne Cash!), and over 5,000 people signed our banner, thereby pledging to join us in our mission to Keep Virginia Beautiful.  We’ve engaged Virginians to sign our banner at other events, but we’ve never had one as full as this, and so many people making that promise.

Again, we can’t say thank you enough for the help and support of MeadWestvaco and the Richmond Clean City Commission.  And we certainly appreciated the help of a number of volunteers to distribute things and assist in cleaning things up.  And our hats certainly are off to the Richmond Folk Festival, Venture Richmond, and the Richmond Green Events Committee.  It’s easier to have a green event like this when you come out of the gate swinging, and these guys really care about that.  And, yes, we got to see some great music and eat some wonderful food.  But more than anything, we wanted to thank the thousands who came to the Folk Festival, used our recycling bins, put their cigarette butts where they were supposed to go, and joined our commitment to Keep Virginia Beautiful.  Even with so many people gathered in one place, it can still be done.

The Featured Image for this post is Courtesy Joe Mahoney via Richmond Times-Dispatch

We had a visit from a friend from across the country.  She has actually been living half way across the world in Alaska.  We took a stroll around downtown Richmond, and she found it shocking that we didn’t have lids on the trashcans.  What did we need lids for?  To keep the trash in the cans?

“No.  To keep the bears out.”

We thought that was pretty ridiculous.  And then we heard about a black bear being sighted on the outskirts of Richmond, just a few miles from where we had been walking.

Sounds incredible, doesn’t it?  A mature, 300 pound black bear, walking around the suburbs.  Maybe he was looking for a frozen yogurt or planning on grabbing a Starbucks.  But it really shouldn’t be that big of a stretch to think that our more urban areas are the home to some large animals.  Virginia was once roamed by many mighty beasts, and some are making quite the comeback.

In Virginia’s Capital city we have seen a resurgence of many large animals.  From the offices in downtown Richmond you can routinely see bald eagles, large turkey vultures, and for a time a breeding pair of peregrine falcons.  Many of the older homes in the historic neighborhoods have hosted red tailed and red shouldered hawks, and ospreys haunt the tidal areas of the lower James River.

The James River has also seen the return of a behemoth from deeper waters.  Scientists from Virginia Commonwealth University have spotted Atlantic sturgeon in the shallows just minutes from the Federal Courthouse.  While anglers have pulled some pretty big catfish and bass from the James, these beasts can grow up to 10 feet long, and the fact that they’re once again returning to the James to spawn speaks highly of our efforts to clean up the river.

And our expansion of green spaces and ecological efforts have helped other species as well.  During Thomas Jefferson’s time, Virginia boasted of elk, bison, wolves, cougars, and many other large mammals.  As our population grew and our Commonwealth became more urban, habitat for these animals became more and more scarce.  By the 1930’s, we had culled or chased out most of our elk and bison, and across the country we were down to about 300,000 deer.  The United States currently has about 30 million white tailed deer, and it often seems like many of those live here in Virginia!

Part of the reason for the rebound of deer in Virginia is the fact that we are about its only predator.  It’s been a while since anyone saw a wolf in Virginia, and a healthy deer is a little large for a bobcat to take down.  And yes, we do have bobcats.  Every few years you’ll hear something anecdotal about a cougar (or puma), but these are probably not Virginia natives.  There are big cats out west, and a small population in the swamps of Florida, but any true mountain lion in Virginia is probably a transplant.  Some researchers say that sightings in Virginia are most likely an animal that was being kept as a pet and ended up getting out.  Kind of like the boas and pythons that are currently eating everything in the Everglades.

One animal that is sneaking back in with some frequency is the coyote.  We think of coyotes as lonesome animals howling at the moon the American Southwest, but they are really quite at home here in Virginia, and often get quite comfortable in our suburbs and cities.  A study from Ohio State University estimates that there may be as many as 2,000 of them living in downtown Chicago, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they’re joining our community here.  Perhaps more interesting is the fact that studies of their DNA show that the coyotes have been mating with wolves, creating a sort of “super-coyote” that is better suited to expansion into newer territories.  They seem to have gotten particularly comfortable in New England, and then followed the Appalachian Mountains south, setting up a thriving community in Northern Virginia.

So it may be a while before we see bison freely roaming the Shenandoah countryside (although there are a few domestic herds in Virginia).  And we may not soon hear the bugle call of a bull elk (although a small herd of western elk was released this past spring near Grundy).  But some of our larger critters are seemingly here to stay.  And this is a good thing.  Making our state friendlier to wildlife is an important step towards our goal to Keep Virginia Beautiful.

I’ll freely admit it:  I like to vacation in North Carolina.  I once lived in Asheville, in the lovely mountains at the far western edge of the state, and I found the town beautiful, the people friendly, and I miss it.  It reminded me of visiting my family in the mountains and hollers of Southwestern Virginia and Southern West Virginia.  I still believe that it’s one of the most beautiful regions on earth.   But my vacations generally take me to the Outer Banks.  And I have to say, I’m a little concerned about some of the things that they’ve been doing.

A member of their General Assembly (David Rouzer, R. 12^th District) has proposed to eliminate the Department of Energy.  Why?

“When I went over to the Department of Energy one day, you walk down the hall and most of them who are drawing 6-figure salaries are sitting there reading books and reading magazines.”

To be totally fair, Rouzer has been an Administrator for the US Department of Agriculture, and graduated college with, not one, but three majors:  Agricultural Business Management, Agricultural Economics, and Chemistry.  So he’s probably pretty smart.  And to get that smart he probably read a few books and magazines.  But that statement sounded pretty silly.

Rouzer would seem to be in good company, though.  A bill passed around the floor of the North Carolina legislature back in May made sea level rise illegal.  Well, it actually made the scientific study of it illegal.  The initial bill said that “These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900.”  So basically, if it rose by this much in 1900, 1901, 1902, etc., that can be your only data.  You couldn’t argue about changing ocean temperatures, currents, or atmospheric predictions, because that didn’t match the historical data.  Well, Mt. St. Helens had never “historically” blown up, but that certainly went sky high in 1980.  The bill sent to the Governor of North Carolina removed that piece, but it does forbid the State from defining anything for regulatory purposes until 2016.  No time like tomorrow to start practicing science.

And what brought out this animosity towards my vacation spot?  A commotion half a world away.

Our Secretary of the Interior has announced that we are going to open parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to oil exploration.  Before you get all riled up, let me say that I own a vehicle, and it uses gas, so I understand the need for oil.  I try to do things to lessen my reliance on fossil fuels, and only drive when I absolutely have to, but I totally understand that we are not going to eliminate oil from our diet overnight.  Oil may, in fact, be here for quite some time.  We’ve grown used to it, and we’re somewhat resigned to that fact.

What leaves me befuddled is the argument by many that industry and nature can live side by side.  There’s no reason, they claim, that we can’t have our country’s largest tract of public land (23 million acres), the wildlife that it supports (bears, wolves, millions of migratory birds, and our nation’s largest caribou herd), and the oil buried beneath it, all at the same time.  We can drill for oil and still provide a place for whales to feed.  We can build roads and infrastructure and still leave a home for polar bears to create dens.

The next time that you head out west and take a trip down Skyline Drive, I want you to think about the fact that much of what you see was once farmland and homesteads in the woods and has been allowed to return to forest.  ANWR has always been wild.  Sure, it has provided a home for the Inupiat and Gwich’in people who have hunted and fished there for thousands of years, but it has also sustained geese and grizzly bears, wolves and wolverines.  The most remote place in America is in ANWR.  It has six ecological zones, ranging from seashore and barrier island (much like my favorite parts of North Carolina and some of the most beautiful land in Virginia), to tundra and eventually mountain peaks.

Again, we’re not getting rid of oil anytime soon.  Sure, North Carolina, Virginia and a bunch of other states are starting to invest heavily in things like wind and solar.  But it seems that opening up a wild and pristine place to oil exploration is heading down a worrisome road, especially in an area that currently has so few of them.  Once you start and pave the first road, you can’t really take it back.  Once you dig a hole in the ground, it’s done.  And if you think that’s not troubling, ask a Gulf Coast resident.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

You know, for decades we thought that DDT was the be all-end all for controlling pests.  We sprayed it on our food, on our beaches, and even sprayed it on people to show how easy it was to get rid of mosquitoes.  When we first started playing with atomic energy, we dumped our radioactive waste in big metal barrels and threw them off of the sides of boats into the ocean.  Lead was our friend, asbestos kept our homes warm, and olestra just made our chips taste better.

But what do we know.

When James Cameron went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he was the first live human to see it since 1960.  But we still don’t really know what happens in a space that is deeper than Mt. Everest is high.  In 1960, Joe Kittinger jumped out of a capsule at 102,800 feet.  Felix Baumgartner is trying to break that record, but we still aren’t sure what will happen.

We’ve spent decades trying to decipher the building blocks of life, and now know that there’s a bigger genetic difference between a horse and a zebra than there is between a human being and a chimpanzee.  Humans, in fact, share a remarkable genetic similarity to a banana.  Don’t know why, but there it is.

Researchers recently discovered a new species of monkey in Africa.  In 2011, we actually discovered over 1,300 brand-new-to-science animals, plants, and organisms.  One was a frog whose habitat is in New York City, centered pretty specifically around Yankee Stadium.  Seems that someone would’ve noticed.

We now know that DDT wreaks havoc on babies, radiation kills life pretty quickly, lead makes great paint but kills nerve cells, asbestos ruins your lungs, and olestra…well, it’s not pretty.

But it’s what we don’t know that’s really scary.  We catch little glimpses when we witness a bigger dead zone in the Chesapeake Bay, or when we realize that our rivers are full of run-off from industry.  We know that certain materials take hundreds, and sometimes thousands of years to break down, but we can’t say what the effect will be because most of them, and us for that matter, haven’t been around long enough to find out.  We relate stories of prairies swarming with buffalo, and as nice as that image sounds, it is just that – and image in our minds, because we probably won’t see it in our lifetime.  And we wonder what someone from the time of the great buffalo herds would say were they to pop up in our day and time?  “What the heck did you do to my planet?”

Sir Isaac Newton said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  The Buddhists call it Karma.  Christians refer to the Golden Rule.  If you smile at someone, they react.  Punch them in the face and you’ll see that there’s more than just physics to Newton’s Law.

We don’t think about this when we toss something carelessly out the window of a moving car.  It doesn’t register when we topple a tree, or pour detergent in our washer.  You may want to ask yourself what the reaction will be to your action.  Where does it go when I spray by lawn?  How much carbon am I releasing today?  Where will those organisms go when I whack down that tree?

But what do we know?  We’re just Keep Virginia Beautiful.

It’s almost that time again.  We’re stocking up on pencils and crisp, new blue jeans and getting ready to send our children back to school.  Here in Virginia, that means sending almost 1.3 million students to a little over 2,000 public institutions, and that’s not counting private colleges and paid pre-school programs.  That also means a great deal of consuming, packaging, and potential waste.

About three quarters of you are planning on sending your kids to class with spanking new clothes, and there is the added cost of pencils and paper and notebooks and lunchboxes.  The US Census Bureau said that we spent about $7.4 Billion on back to school shopping last year.  Much of that will eventually end up in a landfill.  Over half of our children who live less than a mile from a school will end up being driven in every day, and then picked up as we idle in a crowded parking lot.  The average American kid will generate almost 70lbs of waste this year from school lunches alone.

Are we advocating home-schooling or playing hooky for a year?  Of course not, but can you send your little one off to class and still do your part to Keep Virginia Beautiful?  You betcha.  There are plenty of ways to keep your back to school green.

So first things first:  How much new stuff do you need?  If you’re like most homes with children, there is no doubt a drawer or cabinet stuffed to the gills with pens, pencils, crayons, and the like.  It would be nice to have a fresh, matched set of writing utensils, but if you actually consolidated what you had you might find that you have a semester’s worth of tools that are worthy of sending to school.  The same holds true for note taking.  We like to see our students organized, so we color-code and match and organize ourselves into a forest of felled trees.  Binders and notepads are another area where you could easily save some money and help Keep Virginia Beautiful.  You may find that many of last year’s notebooks only have a few used pages, and removing them makes for a brand new year!  Taking these steps also comes in handy when you do go out shopping.  It’s like looking in the refrigerator before you go grocery shopping.

Don’t stop the Reuse mission with the supplies!  We spend a great deal of money on clothing that has the appearance of being worn in just right.  Unless you’re growing like bamboo, the jeans that were purchased in April may be perfect for this fall.  There is nothing wrong with hand-me-downs between siblings, either.  Remember the three R’s:  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  You’ll be purchasing fewer goods, reusing what you can, and recycling last year’s products.

About that recycle thing:  What if you are raising a growing youngster and there are clothes that simply cannot be used?  There are a few things that every child will need this year:  A pencil case, a backpack, and a lunchbox.  You can find plenty of craft projects online like this one that can help you to transform old clothing into something useful.

If you do have to purchase new things, read the darned label.  Clothing made from organic cotton are much better for our environment.  Do a little research to determine if your clever organizer is made from simple plastic, a clear-cut tree, or a sustainable source, like bamboo.  You can also buy pens, pencils, paper and many of your other supplies, all made from recycled materials.

Lastly, how is everyone getting to school?  Most school buses are diesel, and get about two miles per gallon.  Many of us have fond memories of hijinks on the bus, but isn’t part of living in Virginia reveling in our beautiful scenery?  October is International Walk to School Month, but why not make it a longer commitment?  It’s a great opportunity to get some fresh air, enjoy some beautiful fall weather, and maybe meet some people.  Many point to the fact that we often don’t know our neighbors, and it can be hard to meet them from the security of the carpool lane.  You may find that there are those in your neighborhood who share your ideals, and would be willing to organize a group walk or bike ride to school.  There’s safety in numbers, and you’d be doing your part.

Going back to school is exciting.  There are new teachers, new classmates, and new learning experiences.  There is even a First Day of School Smell.  With a little thinking, you can start this year off fresh, and still do your part to make your back to school green and Keep Virginia Beautiful.

You may have missed it, but Virginia celebrated a birthday this week.  We actually shared it with over a dozen other states, but that’s neither here nor there.  Give up?  The Appalachian Trail turned 75.  We sent a card.

In 1921 Benton MacKaye was a forester who penned an article called An Appalachian Trail:  A Project in Regional Planning.  MacKaye was an advocate for land preservation and balancing our needs with the needs of nature.  Our kind of guy.  His idea was to create a series of trails that followed the spine of the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains that would connect farms and wild areas for the hiking pleasures of city dwellers.  The first section, near Bear Mountain in New York, opened in 1923.  The National Trail System Act made it a national trail in 1968 and put much of the management under the care of the Park Service.

Today it’s over 2,000 miles of trails connecting Springer Mountain in Georgia with Mount Katahdin in Maine.  It ranges from just above sea level near the Hudson River in New York to well over 6,000 feet at Clingmans Dome on the Tennessee border.  Here in Virginia, it stretches over 500 miles with elevations from 265 feet to over 5,000 at Mount Rogers.  Almost a quarter of the entire trail lies in our State, and much of that travels through Shenandoah National Park and our National Forests.

Every year there are hundreds of hikers who attempt a “thru-hike” and travel the entire route of the trail.  If you’re new to hiking, the sections along Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway are a good starting point.  These trails are well maintained and don’t vary much in elevation.  But even these easier sections can get you close to some wildlife on a day-hike.  In addition to birds and small mammals, you might spot deer, foxes, and the occasional black bear!  The trail is generally shaded by an abundance of oak, birch, and tulip trees.  If you make it to Mount Rogers, you’ll actually be in a sub-alpine climate with broad meadows.  Who knew?

The neat thing is that while the National Park Service has purchased almost all of the land needed for the Appalachian Trail, and officially they are the stewards, much of the actual work is done by clubs and volunteers.  Kind of like us!  There are loose groups of hikers who like to maintain trails and shelters (and share tips!) and there are very organized and effective organizations like the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.  The ATC engages in physical work to maintain the trail, but also offer education, outreach with the community, and offer a boatload of tips and information about planning your hike.

But the physical aspect of maintaining the Appalachian Trail isn’t just planting some signs.  You would think that it’d be easy – just a trail through the forest.  In addition to making sure that the trail stays clearly marked, they keep it clear of debris, build sections for difficult crossings, and help to maintain the many shelters that line the trail.  They walk the borders of the parks to make certain that we’re protecting the trail, and they engage and educate hikers that they encounter along the way.  These volunteers are the ones who are really the stewards of the Appalachian Trail.

We encourage you to try and take in a section of the Appalachian Trail.  Pause for a moment and take in the scenery.  Revel in the silence.  But much like the mission for Keep Virginia Beautiful, the mantra for the trail groups and hikers is Leave No Trace.  No need to bring the Appalachian Trail a gift.  You being there is enough.

“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.”

Thomas Jefferson said that over 200 years ago.  He was writing from his home outside of Charlottesville – Monticello – and was seeing (even then) the impact that man had on his environment.  After a particularly brutal round of summer storms he wrote,

“I imagine we never lost more soil than this summer. It is moderately estimated at a year’s rent.”

Jefferson had cleared much of his mountain of natural vegetation and was planting food crops.  Now he was paying the price.

Virginia looked considerably different in Jefferson’s day than it does now.  In 1770 the population of our soon-to-be Commonwealth was a little over 400 thousand.  It is now pushing 9 million.  The road from Richmond to Charlottesville was little more than a trail through the rolling hills and virgin forests of the Piedmont.  There are now numerous routes and acres of concrete and asphalt pointing us west.

When people talk about being “green” or using sustainable practices, they often reference how things were in their childhood, or during the time of their ancestors.  There is a great drive and passion to re-embrace forgotten practices in the hope of returning Virginia back to its native beauty.  But is this a realistic dream?  Jefferson didn’t have air conditioning, he didn’t have a computer, and when the sun went down the day was done.  Is that really what we’re striving towards?

We followed the story of Stadium Woods in Blacksburg. This is a stand of trees that has been there longer than Virginia Tech, saw the Civil War, and was around during the times of Jefferson.  Some of these trees are estimated to be 350 years old.  If you cut them down, they’re gone.  You may be able to plant a tree, but it won’t be a 350-year old tree for a few centuries.  Storms have taken trees around the State, like the Surrender Tree, where Richmond’s Mayor surrendered to Union Forces.  It took two bulldozers to move the 24,000-pound trunk.  While the death of this tree wasn’t technically at the hands of man, it nonetheless cannot be replaced.

When you remove a mountaintop that nature spent millions of years creating to get at the coal hidden beneath its crown, the mountain is dead.  You can plant grasses and trees, and they may flourish, but the ecosystem that existed before is no more.  When you pollute a river and a native fish dies off, it will never again be the same river.

And it goes forward, also.  Clearing a path through the woods creates a road, and while convenient, it disrupts nature’s roadway.  A bottle thrown from a vehicle will lay by the side of the road until it breaks down, which will be in a few thousand years.  The decisions that we make today are ones that we will have to live with for years and years to come.

Perhaps a better tack might be to look at what we’re doing moving forward.  We like things like air conditioning and computers and lights.  But what could we accomplish if we really put our heads behind it?

We recycle about 85 million tons of trash in the United States.  And that number is an improvement.  In 2005 we recycled about 32% of all of our trash.  By 2010 that number was up to a little over 34%.  When you’re talking about millions of tons, 2% is a lot of trash, right?  Over in Great Britain, in the country of Wales, they decided that they wanted to do a better job.  They challenged their citizens to recycle everything by 2050.  One Hundred Percent.  In 2005 they recycled around 23% of their waste.  In 2010 it was 48%.  While we improved our recycling by 2% Wales more than doubled theirs.

We can’t un-pave a road or resurrect Mr. Jefferson’s trees.  We can take his advice, though, and plant something useful.  Like a new tree.  We can recycle more than we did yesterday.  We can choose to not use dangerous chemicals on our lawn or turn out the lights or make a conscious effort to purchase environmentally friendly goods.

We might as well face the fact that we can’t turn back the clock.  But we might be able to slow the ticking.