They aren't making enough soapboxes.

Tonight I managed to recycle the unrecyclable. I tore an old Pringles can into pieces, soaked them in water, and peeled off the plastic/metal/paper from either side of the cardboard. All this was done when I really should have been working on the project that's due tomorrow, but at the moment it seemed like the most important thing I could be doing and it would be heresy not to see it through to the end. I felt like I was on the edge of a revelation. Seeing that wealth of cardboard got me thinking of all the Pringles tubes that are thrown out annually, tubes made of TREES that could be put back into the system. I don't know if it was just the insomnia talking, but I suddenly felt very sad that trees aren't respected as much as they should be. Something so massive and daunting, home to an intricate community of plants and animals and part of a delicately balanced, self-regulating system that we could never possibly understand is reduced to a tube of pulp with one purpose only, to be thrown away after that purpose is fulfilled.
Over the past few days, I've been making myself crazy thinking of what each component of everything I use comes from. Fibres from cotton plants, plastic from oil, metals from the ground, adhesives from the bones of dead animals, etc. And it gets overwhelming when you think of just how little you have to do with the things you call yours. I don't know where this material was extracted, who extracted it, how many hours they worked, how much they got paid...I've never seen a field of sugarcane, a salt mine, a pulp mill, a slaughterhouse. All I know is what I see: shelves of clothing, rows of CDs, piles of fruit. It seems like things can go on like this forever, and that somehow, the world will always provide. But we know that oil is running out, that suburbs and megafarms are encroaching on well-maintained agricultural land, that entire species are being wiped out every day. I sometimes wonder if we are entering the next great extinction, a long period of chaos before the lull and eventual upsurge of new biological forms. Or if things will start to quiet down after the collapse of the American empire. I always get gloomy and apocalyptic when I think about what the dominant economy is doing to the state of the world. This make-believe concept of endless progress is driving us into the ground; even economists say it can't last. But we keep running with it, so much so that I'm afraid it won't stop until all our raw materials have run out.
I hate saying things like this, because I'm tired of hearing it myself. Words like "oil" have lost all meaning, relegated to the heap of buzzwords used by high school debate team zealots. I don't know anything about what I'm saying; I don't have any authority on the subject and I don't have the guts to do anything to change it. But some days I feel so impatient with the way things are. The world is falling apart and we still buy disposable products.