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Thank you for taking the time to opening yourself to our movement. I like to share my thoughts around the round Trashwalker Logo. You know that many good things in life are indeed circles. Like wheels that help us to move forward if we have a road or path. Trashwalking is a tool and activity to build a sustainable road to our future and promote a sustainable mindset and culture.

Please look at the logo with me. 

Two open hands are joined together at the wrists to form a bowl that gently holds up the precious Blue Marble, planet Earth, our shared home. One hand is white, the other brown. We are a diverse crowd who share this beautiful but finite home. Earth is surrounded by its thin atmosphere in light blue. It is gently resting on its South Pole in the protective bowl. The hands are not squeezing Earth and provide breathing space, the black emptiness that surrounds the atmosphere.

The red and blue broken circles on the right and left symbolize the extreme and opposing forces in a two-party system. They are the broken wheels that prevent us from moving forward in a good direction. They are outside of the atmosphere already and still want to move further apart in a deadly pursuit of radicalism. They appear to have completely forgotten that we all share the same biology and essential needs for clean air to breathe, pure water to drink, and healthy foods without micro-plastics, heavy metals, or forever chemicals to eat. We cannot eat money, crypto currency, guns, or pronouns! They are not part of a healthy diet even if a corrupt Government is promoting them.
In the US, the extremist pursuit of red and blue is aided and abetted by a deficient system of Government that is a DINO, a Democracy in Name Only. With the electoral college mechanism where states award all their electoral college votes to the winning party in their state, all the votes for the minority party in most states get wiped out. 
Gerrymandering is used by the party in power to stay in power by artificially boosting their political power relative to the votes they received. We have reached a point where the vote of the individual does not make any difference in most states and voting districts. Many eligible voters see the futility of the process and dysfunction of the system and have disconnected. Rather than voters selecting their government, we have corrupt politicians who draw districts for themselves where they are guaranteed to win. They are only interested in keeping themselves in power and do not guide the ship-of-state to a safe destination for all of us. The controls of the ship have been hijacked by a corrupt cabal that uses the power of Government to instill fear in the opposition and the threat of violence by its own pardoned extremists to keep the “elected” representatives of their party toe the line towards the abyss. Or else …

Above Earth we find TRASHWALKER, the name of our new global sustainability movement that wants to protect Earth, its precious eco systems, and all inhabitants. The coloring matches the sustaining hands. I see Earth here like Noah’s Ark in the Bible, Genesis 6-9, during the global flood that lasted 40 days and nights. Trashwalker wants to start a global grassroots reformation to save Earth and us. Earth is our Ark, our lifeboat. 
In my mind, trashwalking can become a unifying foundational activity that most of us can share. It transcends any boundaries that are frequently used to divide us. Nationality, culture, religion, language, gender, age, education, you name it. 
By getting out of our daily protective bubbles (gated communities, cars) and looking for trash and collecting it for proper disposal, we are moving the environment in the right direction. We get better appreciation about the ailments in our community and society. You will find that many people are lazily littering our precious environment with trash. You may encounter depleted tanks of laughing gas that somebody has inhaled to create a chemically induced moment of artificial happiness to temporarily cover their mental state of sadness, despair and isolation. You might find cigarette butts or the remnants of a joint that could have caused a fiery conflagration. I see these as strong signs that many in our community lack a fulfilling purpose in their lives. One carelessly dropped joint from a moment of personal chemical happiness can wipe out whole communities. We must remember or relearn that individual freedom comes with great responsibilities, too. Unfortunately, the US founders created only a Bill of Rights, without explicitly mentioning the responsibilities that come with them in a community. A reformed Constitution should fill this gap by creating a “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities”. This would capture the idea that we are not a “Me First” society and instead care about all of us.

You might find a piece of plastic that is so degraded from the harsh UV radiation that it disintegrates even with the gentle touch of your open, and hopefully gloved hand. Plastic disintegrates into microplastic particles that enter the food chain and may ultimately convert our brains to plastic from within. The sustainable technology to replace oil-based and toxic plastic with compostable replacements exists. We must invest in it, promote it, and scale it up. Don’t follow a leader who sucks and is sucking on the last plastic straw. Shouldn’t straws be made from straw? Such simple logic escapes the plasticized brains of the people in power.

Trashwalking in the same direction with others can be a uniting experience where we pursue a shared purpose and can exchange our thoughts and concerns while achieving something good for the environment. Instead of driving our cars to the gym and walking on a treadmill to nowhere we can save energy and greenhouse gases by trashwalking our neighborhood with friends and neighbors. When we venture outside the isolating, lifeless steel shells of our cars and start to extend our helping and open hands to the environment and each other we are building community and move in a good direction. Walking in clean air is healthy. It can create happiness and great ideas. No laughing gas is required. During a walk, our perspective constantly changes. Looking at problems from different viewpoints is critical to appreciating complexity and truth. By including our children, we can plant a seed for a positive culture of sustainability. Our children are our future. Raising them with a purpose of life and good values cannot be replaced with money. There have been recent results from social studies that show that money alone does not create significant better growth trajectories for our children.

We have all seen a lot of very destructive, deadly flooding in recent years from the increased moisture in the atmosphere. Water that is an essential ingredient of life turns into a force of death. Ocean temperatures have been going up. Invisible but impactful greenhouse gases from human activity are forming a stifling blanket that turns up the heat on Earth. Warmer waters evaporate faster. The atmosphere can hold more moisture at the increased temperature and funnels it to unprepared, remote places that are inundated and destroyed. Warmer temperatures over land also accelerate evaporation from plants and create parched landscapes that are instantly transformed to hellscapes when lightning, an accident, or an arsonist strikes. It is all simple physics at work. We can quibble about the speed of degradation and make bets on the precise time that we will go over the edge of the cliff. That is busy modeling work for experts and scientists. We can all see in our daily experience that we are collectively moving in the wrong, degrading direction. Pretending that Earth is flat, the increase of greenhouse gases is good for us, and there is no gravity so that money always flows upwards only serves special interests at the detriment of regular people and the biosphere.

At the center of the joined hands, we see a red and blue Yin Yang. It symbolizes those of us who do appreciate that our essential and shared needs that unite us are much more powerful than the dividing and polarizing wedge issues that corrupt, trash-talking politicians exploit to keep us divided. These are people who might vote for different parties but know that we all share the same atmosphere, and that we have the power to change our atmosphere, literally and figuratively. These are people who open their hands to welcome each other instead of running around with raised fists. They have open hands that are amazing and delicate tools and can grasp and solve problems. 
Covid showed us that we all share the same essential biology. No matter what our skin color, religion, language, gender, nation, or other personal identities are, we all were under a potentially lethal threat in the Covid death lottery. The Covid spike molecule could screw all of us by screwing through our cell walls. Covid also showed the power of science in understanding the deadly but invisible microbes that can wipe us out, and to create vaccines that saved millions. Tragically, we are now seeing extremists in government who are attacking science and public health. Abandoning public health in the name of individual freedom extends a helping hand to the microbes that want to kill us. That is treason to humanity. Our enlightened forefathers who climbed the evolution wall of science with their curiosity would be horrified how humanity is backsliding on a precipitous path of evilution, pushed towards the edge of the cliff by trash-quacking quacks. We now have a government of charlatans that is outright hostile to science and is rapidly destroying public health. They are engaging in blinding all of us by defunding critical scientific measurement missions on Earth and in space. It is high time to stop following these lame and dumb ducks.
Here I must sincerely apologize to real ducks. They are wonderful, funny, caring, and smart.

My hope is that the people that are symbolized by the Yin Yang will become Trashwalkers to form the fulcrum of this global movement to create real change towards global sustainability. To become a Trashwalker you don’t need a special education, or be part of the coastal elite, or an essential worker, or buy an expensive membership in a club. You don’t have to be an octogenarian to contribute. In fact, even a three-year-old is a better Trashwalker than most Octogenarians. Why do we want politicians who are not even useful to collect wayward trash to decide where we need to walk into a bright future? Everybody can join Trashwalker and make the world a better place. We do not need a “Pope of the Trashwalkers” for this movement to walk forward. This is truly a democratic, all-inclusive endeavor for big and small to share and contribute. I know that there are already many people who are moving with me in this direction. It made me happy when I recently met a Trail Guardian who collected trash from Crystal Cove State Park.

At the center of Earth, we see the circle of a sustainable, circular economy where manufacturing, use, and recycling form a closed circle of life. This is one of the important targets of the Trashwalker movement. If we are successful, then our walk will lead to a future without rotating garbage gyres that we create with our plastic culture in the oceans today.

Life as we know it would not be possible without oxygen. The oxygen in our atmosphere was created by photosynthesis in tiny but countless blue-green algae. The small impact of the individual algae added up to a gigantic transformation of life on Earth. Similarly, our individual contributions add up to our destiny. Heaven, or Hell. We are making the choice.

Aside from Oxygen, CO2 is an important molecule in our atmosphere because of its impact on the climate. When we look at the historic record of CO2 in the atmosphere, we see that over 400,000 years it stayed between about 150ppm to 300ppm. The beginning of the industrial revolution starts an exponential increase of CO2 thanks to the exploitation of fossil fuels by humans. This became a Faustian bargain. Initially the impact of CO2 was invisible like CO2 itself. But now in my lifetime of less than 60 years the CO2 loading of the atmosphere has dramatically increased from 330ppm to 425ppm. In just a few years we will be 50% higher than at any time since homo sapiens started to walk consciously on Earth. The explosive growth of the CO2 load is a great concern to me, and it should be a great concern to all of us who share homo sapiens’ biology. The climate system is complex and has non-linear tipping points with positive feedback that can accelerate the greenhouse gas emissions from soil like methane that is locked in permafrost. 

There is good news hidden in the CO2 explosion. We were powerful enough to create it with the extractive technologies that we developed. And humanity used part of the abundant fossil energy to create valuable, powerful sustainable technology and achieved massive improvements in our capability to provide sustainable energy. Solar and wind power are competitive and ready to be deployed at scale. We have reached a milestone where we can create the essential energy for a blossoming, modern society without the destructive and dirty forces that are required to extract and incinerate fossil fuels. We can avoid triggering the destructive Armageddon response of Mother Earth to the exploding CO2 pollution. 

It is very sad to read how the Trump administration is engaging now in all-of-Government, hostile sabotage of significant investments in offshore wind power. Spurious arguments are made to stop projects that have invested billions of $US and are only months away from completion. It reminds us of Don Quixote fighting the windmills. To protest such nonsense peacefully and measurably, Trashwalkers can adopt the strategy to shift purchases from “Trump Tuesday” to “Freedom Fridays”. We all have the power of our own purse. Let’s flex our economic muscles to send a clear message by rocking the daily sales data.

https://www.djtpresidentiallibrary.com/shop-freedom-fridays

The fossil fuel economy transfers wealth and power to destructive, selfish actors. Some of them wage war on their neighbors and nature. We can stop to aid and abet their deadly pursuit of power and riches by turning around individually. Our individual actions all matter and will add up. My family was able to reduce gasoline use by a factor of eight by retiring a minivan and investing in a plug-in hybrid car and solar panels. We must remember that CO2 accumulation and counting in the atmosphere has no Electoral College or Gerrymander mechanism that makes our contributions insignificant or pointless. All our individual actions and inactions add up. When more of us adopt more sustainable technology we can make a big difference together

The time to trashwalk is now! Choosing dividing trashtalk, stagnation, and procrastination is selecting the road to destruction, extinction, and global misery. It is time to stop stealing from our children’s future. We must discard unsustainable fiscal policies and adopt prudent reforms of deficient, undemocratic political systems. We don’t need another violent revolution. We can all be the change that saves us by motivating smart reforms. 

Let’s turn this ship around together! Together, we have the power! Let’s flex our muscles and financial resources to invest in an Earth-shot initiative that is worthy of the passion, ingenuity and determination of the original Moon-shot initiative that brought humans safely to the Moon in less than 10 years in the 1960s. Let’s save ourselves like the Apollo 13 crew saved themselves when they retrofitted their lifeboat, the Lunar Lander, with a CO2 scrubber that sustained them on their long drift around the moon and back to Earth for a successful and glorious landing. They did not rely on an endless, futile mantra of “thoughts and prayers” to fix their problems. Those are the toothless tools of the do-nothing octogenarian politicians that are just waiting to die and go to Heaven (their wish), or Hell (their deserved destination) while milking their privileged position. 

We must grasp Earth and see that we are all part of the problem. You may have heard “See Something, Say Something”, from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to encourage the public to report suspicious activity. At Trashwalker we adopt a responsible mindset and follow “See Something, Do Something”. We cannot rely on others to solve the problems we create. We can all open our hands and work together and be part of the solution by individually choosing smart sustainability over mindless consumerism and fossil fuel extraction and exploitation in our daily decisions. The future can be cleaner, brighter, more electric, and free of chimneys and tailpipes. There is no beautiful clean coal. Let’s tie our shoes and trashwalk towards a shared, promising and sustainable purpose. A life without single use plastics and forever chemicals or lead in our drinking water. 

True conservatives conserve the beauty of nature and its wonderful resources for future generations. Fake “Conservatives” want to preserve their privilege and corrupt advantage to exploit nature and the human community. We know preservatives are toxic. Let’s trashwalk these “Preservatives” into the toxic waste dump of history. If we break down “Conservative” we find “Con” and “serv”. Don’t get conned to serve their corrupt, self-enriching desires. Their expiration date has passed! Let’s safely dispose of the “Cons” on a certified toxic waste facility so that the poison in their system does not pollute any other people or resources.
Maybe we can declare Congress in Washington into a Superfund site and lock the toxic “Cons” away for all our safety?

Please share this message. Our future depends on it to go viral and find more Trashwalkers who are willing to move. 

Use your social media channel to forward this message and make our movement successful.

We all can be a beneficial Trashwalker virus for humanity and share a hopeful, positive message! 😊 Our future is in our open, caring hands. It is not in our fists.

Godspeed

Christian, a happy Trashwalker and primus inter pares