True cost

To be committed to saving the planet, recycling, conservation, these concepts like so many other endeavors in human history have been perverted and twisted into idiot marketing schemes, sound and righteous fury, signifying nothing.

What does it mean, hypothetically, if a certain on-campus coffee shop offers recycled packaging, to lessen corporate impact on rainforests, but also uses a coffee blend that relies on deforested land to grow?

Absolutely bupkis. Even so, both on-campus chain coffee shops use sun-grown beans as opposed to the shade-grown alternative. Why? Because the genetically engineered plants that can grow in direct sunlight are cheaper to operate and harvest.

The thing is, sun-grown coffee isn't as tasty, and more than that, sun-grown beans rely on land that could be left forested if the growers would stick to shade-grown plants. It's directly cheaper, but that's only part of the issue.

Conservationism; real conservationism, honestly undertaken and free from the shackles of the bottom-line troglodytes that big companies hire to sell an eco-friendly image, is not recycling. It is not using eco-friendly packaging. Conservationism is looking at the world as a network of energy, wherein everything is linked and every withdrawal affects what energy is left, and trying to minimize our impact on that system.

It is not the Starbucks Shared Planet. That is the MTV generation's approach to saving the world: look sexy while you scrub up an oil spill and drown when the icecaps melt.

USA Today printed an article on Tuesday about plastic bag manufacturers committing to a 40 percent recycled-material plastic bag by 2015. This article was a perfect example of the incomplete equation that is presented to us by so-called "conservationists."

Through a lessened burden on the initial manufacturing process these companies will allegedly lower their annual output of greenhouse gasses by 463 million pounds. The question that is left unanswered though, is how much will be put into the atmosphere by the recycling process.

Because, you know, that's a high-energy chemical process too.

The disgusting thing is that low-energy plastics recycling processes already exist; their implementation just requires that spark of intelligence these companies all seem to be lacking. Instead of using high-heat to turn plastic bags back into plastic bags, use low-heat processes to turn all unwanted trash plastic (literally any kind of plastic can be used) into industrial plastic products like highway cones and pallets.

What is currently offered to the people, however, does not resemble true conservationism. It is the image of caring, nothing more. Failing at joining the solution these people have become part of the problem.

It's all about the balance of energy, like a chemistry problem. If the energy doesn't balance when you write your answer, you got it wrong. The problem is if we fail this test then we might all die.