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I’ve enjoyed Scott’s email and the discussion
that it stimulated. I particularly liked Rick Reibstein’s recent
comment. Then, just now, a friend who is not part of the P2 community
sent me this email which I thought was appropriate to share… Comrades- ****************** Business Environmental Program NSBDC-UNR (775) 689-6677 WRPPN is a proud member of P2Rx (www.P2Rx.org). P Please consider the environment before
printing this e-mail From:
owner-p2tech@great-lakes.net [mailto:owner-p2tech@great-lakes.net] On Behalf Of Butner, R Scott <tangent ramble_mode="true" coherence="low" relevance="questionable"
verbosity="high"> P2TECH-ies (and a few selected other friends) --
I've come, once again, to drink from the well of your wisdom.
I even brought my own (non-disposable, stainless steel,
bisphenol A-free) cup. The precipitating event for this e-mail is an invitation I
received the other day from our esteemed colleague Jeff Burke, Executive Director of the
National P2 Roundtable. He wanted to know if I was willing to spend
a few minutes during the NPPR break-out session at the National Environmental
Summit on Wednesday May 21, to help kick off a discussion session among the NPPR membership.
Rousing the rabble, as it were. Well, I can rarely turn down a chance to stand in front of an
audience and hold forth, especially if not bound by any strict accountability
to things like "facts" or "data." Besides, I've spent a long time attending NPPR meetings, sort
of an intellectual lint ball hanging from the rich tapestry that is the P2
community, so it was an excuse -- an opportunity! -- to come to How could I refuse? However, now I find myself facing the bleak consequences of accepting
his invitation -- specifically, having
to select a discussion topic which will provoke the audience
to such stimulating conversation that they go home saying, "I am SO glad I went to the This is where the challenge comes in: I got
nuthin'. Nada. Zip. Less than zero.
--------- Now, left to my own devices, I will come up with
something. I always do. But I'd like to invite this group to suggest topics for
discussion that YOU would like to see NPPR have, regarding the future
of the organization, and of the P2 community. Got ideas? Send them to me. By now, you know
where to find me. Otherwise -- and consider this a warning, not threat --
in two weeks the audience at the "Going Softly into That Dark Night -- a P2 Strategy Whose Time has Come?" Yeah. You heard me. In the words (word?) of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut:
"Listen."
--------- So, last Saturday -- as fine a day as has yet to grace the
2008 calendar; a virtual poster child for springtime in the northwest! --
I spent the morning, and well into the afternoon, working in my garden, communing
with the worms, soaking up the sun, and contemplating what message I wanted to
bring to the Alas, pulling weeds, planting gladiolas, and deciding where
in the garden I should relocate the family totem pole ("Fred") took
provided more distractions than you'd think they could.
So while I accomplished much in the garden, by 4 p.m. I had made little headway
towards crafting my But it's late April and
days are getting longer up here at 47 degrees north latitude;
even at 4 p.m. we had hours of daylight left. So I decided to take a
long-contemplated, oft-postponed trip across the desert to visit the Juniper
Dunes Wilderness, a 7,000 acre "island" of juniper and 100-foot sand
dunes surrounded by the soft green contours of dryland wheat, the giant
irrigated bullseyes of potato farms, and the sage-filled shrub-steppe that
fills all the spaces in between. Though it is only 45 miles from my home,
I'd never visited it. I figured the drive would do me some good. At
the very least, I might find some good light for taking photographs of the wild
rhubarb that was reputed to grow there. I could sink my toes deep
into the sand. If I was lucky, I'd find some deeper inspiration to
sink my teeth into as well. I packed up my camera and tripod, climbed into my Mazda --
which like me, has more miles on it than I'd like to admit, and is overdue for some
preventative maintenance -- and backed out of the driveway onto Stevens
Drive. I pointed the car in a generally eastern direction. Figuratively speaking, of course, since our street runs
north/south. As I pulled away from the curb, I turned on my iPod, and heard
the opening refrains of an old Pointer Sister's song from the 70's: "Now's
the time for all good men I turned the volume up a few notches -- turns out that my dad
was right -- I DID wreck my hearing, listening to that music so loud! Now I have little choice but to turn it up. For what it's worth, I've long thought that this song --
"Yes We Can Can," from their self-titled first album released in 1973
-- is, to my mind, perhaps the last viable candidate for an anthem for my
generation. As far as I can tell, it remains untouched and unspoiled, not yet co-opted into selling
SUV's or laundry detergent or acting as a cliched audio synopsis each time that Hollywood wants to
pay lipservice to that period of simultaneous political unrest and (for a brief
while) enormous optimism that was the late 60's. As such songs go, it's
too long, and takes too much time to get to the point, and can't be easily
fitted into a 30 second format. Though I suspect that even now,
some cynical Madison Avenue types are working
on it. They're sitting around a big table, probably made of endangered
tropical hardwoods, making plans to strip
away the innocence from yet one more song in
hopes of convincing middle aged consumers
that they can replace their own lost innocence with a bit of cheap nostalgia and a Prius in the driveway. I know. Cynical. Though, some would respond that
cynicism is the only logical response to the world we live in. Those would be the cynical ones, by the way. At least
we're consistent. On this fine Saturday, however, I didn't entertain such
thoughts for even a moment. My mood
buoyed by good music, and admittedly feeling a little TOO self-satisfied about
spending the last hour meticulously pulling dandelions by hand so that I didn't
have to resort to herbicides, I drove off towards the dunes and started to
contemplate discussion topics for my
Summit presentation.
--------- This may seem, on the surface, to be much ado about
nothing. After all, I'd been asked to give a ten minute talk -- the
primary purpose of which is to get OTHER people to enter into the
discussion. No one was asking me to be the authority about
anything. * (I feel compelled to add here -- as a pre-emptive measure
against those who know me well -- to say in my defense that there ARE things I am an
authority on. Really. It's just that few people are very interested in them, which is precisely what
allows me to be the authority -- niche specialization being an important
adaptitve strategy in any ecosystem). All I had to do was relate a few
ideas about current issues facing P2, and get the ball rolling. Plenty of people smarter than me would be in the audience, and
they could take it from there. Simple, really. Right? The problem I faced was this: I'm a P2 has-been. Tasked with talking to a bunch of P2 up-and-comers. See, even by my own admission, most of the truly interesting work in my
20+ year career in pollution prevention -- real fun stuff dealing with
mass transfer in supercritical CO2 parts cleaning,
multi-objective process optimization, project prioritization methodologies,
environmental lifecycle analysis, debunking ISO 14001, design for environment,
"green" accounting software….is more dated than a high school
prom queen. Like a lot of us, though, I continue to chug along, making contributions
where I can, trying to stay reasonably current with the latest and
greatest. But still painfully aware that I am increasingly out of
touch. I was wrapping my mind around this bitter reality when I
turned off of Highway 12 onto the "It's
better to burn out/Than it is to rust…" And with that lyric, juxtaposed as it was against the ongoing
contemplation of my own rustiness, my mood shifted out of the blue, and into
the black.
--------- Bear in mind: with 5,438 different songs on my iPod,
the odds of this particular song playing at this particular
moment in time were relatively small. It's a simple matter of statistics.
Lots of songs means a small chance of any given song being
played. For instance, I once calculated that I could drive from
Seattle to Fresno, California -- and BACK again -- listening ONLY to my
collection of Elvis Costello songs, and never hear the same song twice.
I should note that I've never actually tried to verify this
experimentally. For one -- who wants to
go to At any rate, I'd recently finished reading "This is Your
Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession," a great book by
record-producer turned congitive psychologist Daniel Levitin, which discusses
how the human brain processes music (and which, incidentally, closes with an
air-tight scientific explanation, based on sound evolutionary principles, of
why the bass players always get all the girls). Perhaps because I'd been reading this book, I started paying
more attention than usual to the lyrics of the songs that were playing.
Egged on by the coincidence of Neil Young's great tribute to Johnny Rotten, his warning against musical
obsolesence, and the contemplation of my own technical
obsolesence, I started noting (or was it, constructing?) a certain theme in the songs that played. The pattern was set, I think, when the next song in the queue was Pink Floyd's "Time"
from the "Dark Side of the Moon" CD: "Every
year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Or this -- from "Thousand Year Prayer" by the
Cowboy Junkies: "Here
we all are at the end of "the century of beauty lost". Eddie Vedder's voice rang true on Pearl Jam's "All Those
Yesterdays" "Don't
you think you've done enough? Followed back to back by an oldie from Counting Crows:
"I
got bones beneath my skin, mister... and by a recent favorite of mine from Death Cab for Cutie:
"Love
of mine Now, lest you think that my musical collection consists
entirely of dark, self-possessed songs by Emo kids in black sweatshirts, I'll
have you know that I have my fair share of upbeat songs as well. But in any string of random events, there exists a finite
possibility that a sequence will emerge which gives the appearance of being by
design. And if I were a spiritual person, I might even have been tempted
to think that the heavens were sending me a message. On such matters, though, I tend to subscribe to the world
according to Iris Dement: "Everybody's
wonderin' what and where they all came from. In any event, whether by design or by chance, the great
epiphany came as I turned left off the Snake River Road, skidding across the
crushed gravel of East Blackman Ridge Road in a cloud of dust. >From a
distance, my dust cloud would have been the only moving thing visible for miles
in any direction. As I crested a ridgeline, the road bent to the west,
pointing me into the setting sun and momentarily blinding me to the
presence of spring calves standing idly in the road. I veered around
them, leaving tire tracks at the edge of a wheat field, and regained my
purchase on the road. In that moment of brilliant light, I was illuminated -- and I
swear I am not making this up -- by the opening verse of Poi Dog Pondering's
"Bury Me Deep" "A
lifetime of accomplishments of which the dirt knows none, And there it was in front of me, as plain and as bright as
the setting sun: "Going quietly" as the final frontier in
pollution prevention.
--------- See, like many of a certain age, I've begun to come to terms
with my own eventual mortality. I'm not quite 50 yet, but my parents both
died fairly young so I figure I'd best get an early start on thinking about
such things. Like many of my cohorts, I have made certain wishes known to
my loved ones -- how heroic I expect them to be in extending my life, what to
do with any "stuff" I have left over when the game ends. What
to do with ME when the game is over. The usual details. But it occurred to me that perhaps in death there was an
opportunity I'd been overlooking -- a way to take make sure that I truly
reduced my footprint on this earth. What if, I thought, I simply decided
not to fight the inevitable? What if I allowed myself to go quietly into
the dark when my body finally decided it was time to let go? No heroic measures. Not even any mildly strenuous
measures. My med-alert bracelet would read "No, really -- don't
bother on my
account!" No life support, no blood pressure medications, no
defibrillators or emergency heart surgery should I one day find myself
clutching my chest. None of it. Roll the dice and accept the
consequences without regret. Walk into and beyond the white light, and
don't look back. Not willing myself to an early death -- certainly not! -- but
instead, making a decision in relative health, to spare myself those last years
when medical science can only preserve life, but not the quality of it. Think about it: what better way to reduce your
footprint on this earth, than simply ceasing to be? No more worrying about the environmental impact of that beef
you had for dinner. No fussing over the awful taste of soy milk and
longing for the stuff that comes from cows. No more being haunted by the
faint hum of the air conditioner on a sleepless summer night. No
"paper or plastic?" conundrums, or wondering if that ethanol-spiked
89 octane you put in the Prius was REALLY taking food off the table of a family
in No more hauling around your stainless steel coffee cup, or
sidestepping the issue of whether the coffee beans you put in your grinder
couldn't really be replaced with something grown closer to home. Organically grown? Doesn't mean a thing to a corpse.
Ashes to ashes, and all that. As I trudged up the side of a 100 foot sand dune, sinking
back one step for every two I took, I began to get excited by all this. I
mean, this was a breakthrough! One person, by himself, wasn't going
to change the world this way -- but thousands -- no, millions! -- well, we
could ALL take the pledge to go away without a whimper when our times
came. Each of us might shave 5, maybe 10 years off of our time on the
planet, and with it, effect a proportional reduction in our environmental
impact. This was frickin' brilliant, I panted, as I crested the
tallest dune and stared into the sun. I sat down in the sand and watched five different varieties
of beetle trace tracks across the sand -- anyone who expired here would
certainly release his inner skeleton! While the beetles kept careful
notes in the sand, I began to ponder out loud all the things that needed
to be done. We'd need to have plastic wrist bands -- black, of
course. Public service announcements -- I'm thinking Christopher Walken
or Anthony Hopkins as our spokesperson. Hire a writer -- a ghost writer,
if you will -- to create a best-selling self-improvement book: "How
to save the Earth by not even trying!" Guest appearances on
Oprah AND the Daily Show. Product placement in Starbucks. And viral
marketing over Facebook. Bumper stickers, of course. But we'd be very selective
about who could buy them, and we wouldn't sell them to ANYONE whose car
didn’t get at least 30 mpg, or carry at least two passengers. I mean, you wouldn't want to risk selling out, right?
Oh, there would be detractors. The pharmaceutical
companies would be the loudest. They'd lobby for publicly subsidized
medications for all those who hadn't joined our crusade, in a vain attempt to
make up for lost revenues. Network news shows would run negative stories
about the cult-like nature of the movement -- after all, us old people are the
only ones that still watch their drivel, and they know it. They can't
afford to lose a single one of us! The religious right wouldn't know what to do about us -- I
mean, they don't like assisted suicide, but leaving it in God's hands?
What could be wrong about that, other than the fact it was a bunch of tree
huggers who were embracing the idea? There would be some who tried to stop us. They'd lobby
and cajole and preach against this noble gesture of ours. But we would prevail -- or die trying. Yes, this would be my crowning accomplishment as a P2
professional -- the final frontier. The sun perched on the horizon. The dunes shifted
imperceptibly with the wind. Lone blades of grass etched compass circles
in the sand, marking the direction of the wind. Though the warmth of the
spring day began to drain from the sky, I felt good. The
gloom that had followed me into the wilderness had wandered away, leaving not
even a trace of footprints in the sand. So I lifted myself up, bid
adieu to the beetles, who nodded quietly in acknowledgement, and returned to
their note taking. I began walking back to the car through the
sage. I watched for rattlesnakes and listened for coyotes, who, in these
parts, typically greet the coming night in a raucous fashion -- but aside from
the wind, all was quiet. A mile or two later, I reached the car, happy in the
knowledge that I still had a good idea or two left in me. After all, I
might very well be over the hill, but there are still more hills ahead to climb,
and new views waiting at the top of each of them.
--------- Fast forward a couple of days. Far from the sand dunes,
immersed in a different sort of inner wilderness, and viewing things in a different
sort of light -- I'm starting to realize that maybe the whole "early
death as the ultimate P2 strategy" idea still has a few obstacles to
overcome. Like, living, for one. It's sort of become a habit of
mine, and we all know how hard habits are to break. And my wife wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about this idea as
I was. Go figure. The Oprah people told me they weren't interested,
either. I wonder if Ozzie Osbourne has a book club? These are not insurmountable obstacles to be sure.
Nothing that a few really good graphics and a celebrity endorsement or two
couldn't help. I mean, it worked for Al Gore, right? Maybe I could talk Michael Moore into making a documentary
about the topic -- after all, we met once, 30 years ago, and I'm only one
connection away from him in my LinkedIn network. The idea -- that was the main thing. I mean, everything
made by man starts in the same place -- as an idea. Peter Gabriel even
tells us so: "Looking
down on empty streets, all she can see All of
the buildings, all of those cars As ideas go, maybe this one still needs some work. But
it's a start. Looking back 15 years or so to the Engineering Foundation
conferences on P2, I can recall walking and talking with dear friends along the
beach in Santa Barbara (and later, San Diego) or sitting in a hotel lobby,
engrossed in late-night conversations about how technology alone was not going
to do the trick. This seemed a great revelation to a technologist like
myself; it was self-evident, I am sure, to those who considered technology as a
foreign language. We talked of the need to change consumer
behavior. To get manufacturers interested in pursuing
"green" markets. To get celebrities "on the
bandwagon" for our cause. To think beyond the confines of the plant
gate to how our communities were built. We talked about the need to make "green" the
world's favorite color. And looking around me today, I feel like a modern Rip Van
Winkle -- awaking after a long sleep in a world that is somehow both strange
and familiar at the same time. So much of what we hoped for has come to pass --
I've seen more ads touting the "green" attributes of various
companies and products in the past year, than in all the years leading up to
this time. Gas prices are high, people are conserving fuel -- for
now. It's like we've rubbed the lantern, set free the genie, and
have been granted our first wish. We've got two left. What shall we do with them?
And yet…. And yet, all the while, the glaciers vanish, the ice caps
crumble. The precautionary principle asserts itself in a world that
repeatedly throws caution to the wind. The second law is enforced vigorously and without
mercy. Things are running down. Time is running out. Still, I am an optimist at heart, evidence to the contrary
notwithstanding. Remember the Pointer Sisters? "I
know we can make it. Thirty five years later, I actually still believe that
sh*t. It touches a still-clean part of me that hides deep down, and when
it does, I know that they were telling the truth then. And it's still the
truth now. So. Tell me something good. Shine a ray of light
through this dark cloud and tell me where P2 is going. Where YOU want it to
go. Venture a guess about where our new frontiers are. What do you
see from your sand dune, when you look towards the horizon? As Elvis once sang: "Let's talk about the future, now we've put the past away"
You've seen one of my ideas. I've set the bar low --
certainly you can do better than THAT! I mean, old and worn out though I may be, I've got some fight
left in me. Cynical as I've become, I'd still love to change the
world. Wouldn't you? great gosh a-mighty!
</tangent> P.s. -- for those patient souls who have made it all the way
to the end, I've chosen some photographs to go along with the text… http://www.flickr.com/photos/rs_butner/sets/72157604824211565/show/
Pictures may be worth a thousand words -- but they're a lot
faster. ========================================
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