You Must Save You From Ourselves

In the arcology, everyone has to live in their small space and make it sustainable, I suppose.

Now New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is taking a break from his truly sinister behavior (such as continuing to push unlawful and discriminatory stop-and-frisk measures) to simply act like Woody Allen’s insane dictator in Bananas. Bloomberg, reports the New York Times, is “taking on a new cause: requiring New Yorkers to separate their food scraps for composting.”

I’d note that Mayor Bloomberg is not the first to do this.  Several towns in the west and northwest have been pushing compost bins for a while.  But you’d expect that, given that the hippy kids finally grew up and started running things.  The NY Times gives the full details.  Read all of it, especially if you’re eating while reading this. It’ll help with weight loss, and you’ll also be able to participate on your own right away!

Recent pilot programs in the city, though, have shown an unexpectedly high level of participation, officials said. As a result, the Bloomberg administration is rolling out an ambitious plan to begin collecting food scraps across the city, according to Caswell F. Holloway IV, a deputy mayor.

The administration plans to announce shortly that it is hiring a composting plant to handle 100,000 tons of food scraps a year. That amount would represent about 10 percent of the city’s residential food waste.

Who wants to bet that the composting plant is a buddy of someone’s buddy in the mayor’s office?  Anyone want to take the contra?  Darn, those odds are just too low…

The residential program will initially work on a voluntary basis, but officials predict that within a few years, it will be mandatory. New Yorkers who do not separate their food scraps could be subject to fines, just as they are currently if they do not recycle plastic, paper or metal.

On average, recycling costs more to a city’s waste management than just dumping it all in an landfill.  But recycling makes us feel good, and paying indulgences to the church of Green keeps everyone here in Heaven on Earth.  Whatever.

I don’t necessarily think any of these ideas are bad, though the unintended consequences are rife:  We’ll make criminals out of innocent people who don’t have time to learn the various trash separation skills.  We’ll also be further intruding into the lives of people who are mostly just trying to live in tighter spaces without bothering anyone else.  If you can’t play along, you can’t live in the herd.  Sorry, you’re out on your own…

The counterargument is that this is the way that people in the country would live… not wasting anything, saving the scraps to grow food, etc.  Well, people choose to live that way.  In the city, people aren’t given a choice.  The city is supposed to be a living organism, capable of tending to itself as it grows.  I suppose the path to arcology is just too hard if you can’t get the micro-organisms to participate.