When it comes to the environment, they mean business!

Blowin' in the wind. I don’t talk specifics when it comes to politics. It can just be too incendiary and I hate conflict. But it’s been a wild election season and ever since the caucus whirled through Minnesota, I’ve noticed a curious political contradiction playing out — literally — on the street in front of my house. The night before the MN caucus, the campaigns canvassed residential neighborhoods with shiny get-out-the-vote fliers. The fliers indeed had helpful information — what time to vote, location, directions, etc. But now it’s been several weeks and the fliers are still floating on the wind in my neighborhood. They cake the sidewalk, ride ice floes toward the storm drains, stick to the trunks of trees. In a year when every serious presidential contender is talking about the environment, isn’t having shiny, probably-took-a-lot-of-energy-to-produce fliers that subsequently become free-floating environmental garbage a big fat contradiction? Perhaps it’s an unintended consequence of the grueling demands of presidential campaigning (I couldn’t do it. You can see in their eyes exactly how much sleep they aren’t getting. It makes me tired just watching them…), but it irks me. Every time I walk the dogs, I see a candidate’s smiling face blow past me just like “the most beautiful” plastic bag in American Beauty (oh, Alan Ball, do you ever do anything short of a masterpiece?) on its way to clogging up my watershed. How do I believe a candidate’s professed sincerity about fixing the environment while I’m peeling their garbage of the bottom of my winter boots?