The truth about reciclying

The other day, as a procrastination exercise, I cleaned up the desk at my office. The job consisted, essentially, in throwing away many drafts of my papers and organizing some other people's papers, for future reference. My desk now is quite tidy, and I am proud of myself. I ended up throwing into the bin approximately 1500 pages, among preprints and handwritten sheets. How come so many pages? It turns out that while producing a paper (and especially when a deadline approaches) I tend to print a lot of versions of the current draft---more or less, one draft per day---so after submitting I end up with ten or more copies of the same work. There is also the issue that I have problems reading from the screen, and prefer to read something by printing it and making annotations on the paper.

So I am pretty much unable to do ecological research. I always remember Alan, who is quite an ecological guy in his research: he hardly prints anything, he gets cool software tools so as to do everything directly on his laptop, and, perhaps most importantly, he seems to be quite consistent in these habits. He doesn't even use the air conditioning in his office, although this is a more arguable point. I wish I could be more sensitive in this issue; I tell myself that nothing is better than actual paper, and how annoying is reading from the screen. Still, I am unable to change my habits. I don't feel bad at all. The reason is very simple: recycling is useless.

Of course recycling is a very reasonable idea, in principle. However, I have come to realize that in the current state of the world, it is a rather useless effort. That is to say, the state of our planet is so critical that individual efforts (such as separating your trash, our concrete contribution to recycling) end up being essentially useless. We need more decisive actions, both from individuals and governments. Here's a simple idea: if wasting trees and paper is a problem, then a truly determinate action would be adding huge taxes on paper and ink so as reduce their consumption (and hence, their waste). Just like what some scandinavian countries do with alcohol. Wasting paper is just so easy, as paper is cheap and nobody cares about buying more. It is easy to think of similar ideas in other settings.

Needless to say, individual actions such as separating you trash are positive. We should continue doing them while bearing in mind that they're little effective---the overall sum of little efforts is still too small in the context of the problem. I have realized more clearly the environmental problems we are facing after visiting the US. It was shocking to me to see the different sense of proportion people have there. Distances are so huge; your social success seems to be represented by the size of your car. Sadly, waste also comes in absurd proportions. It seems to me that the positive environmental actions of an average European family in a week (separating thrash, riding bikes, using public transportation) are lost by the negative effects of a single American SUV which is used the whole day.

There is also the point of people feeling good about themselves when doing ecological efforts. That's a different story, though.

Bolillo

While the global economy collapses, people in third-world countries such as Colombia receive  reassuring messages such as "we are well protected against any potential crisis in the short term". Of course, this is a reassuring way of saying that we count too little in the world so as to be affected. With the financial aspect duly covered, we are thus free to deal with the important issues. In Colombia, these days, this unavoidably means football. In fact, these days the FIFA U-20 World Cup is taking place in eight Colombian cities. We were convinced that tourists from all over the world would come to visit our cities, drink our alcohol, sleep (and dance!) with our women, watch some football, and leave some foreign money in the process. This, apparently, hasn't been the case, even if authorities at every level are doing their very best in welcoming visitors.

The football fever is so strong these days that we have almost forgotten that our former president reacts to everyday issues with insane rants on twitter. (In a side comment, it is worth saying that some weeks ago, his account was hacked; in an unfortunate---yet funny---choice of words he said that he had been penetrated by hackers.) With the young Colombian team doing reasonably OK, the spotlights are currently on Hernán Gómez, the coach of the professional national team. Mr Gómez's nickname is "Bolillo", which is the Colombian word used to refer to the baton used by policemen. In spite of this nickname---and apart from the vulgar way in which he expresses himself---until the last weekend we had no evidence of Bolillo's violent character. It turns out that last Saturday he got drunk and repeatedly punched a woman in the face. It is no clear what caused this reaction or who the woman is. Some say she's a disappointed lover, but who really cares? This guy is attacking women!

You will never be able to anticipate how public opinion in Colombia will react to this kind of introspective affairs. I purposefully say introspective because this is an unusual violent fact in an inherently violent country: we are quite good at killing ourselves. Violence against women in southamerican countries (and in Spain, I believe) is, sadly, rather common; the unusual thing is that this time it comes from famous people. Opinions were divided as whether he should resign to his job as coach or not. On the one hand, he did reasonably OK in last Copa América, and the qualifying round for the World Cup should start soon. On the other hand, this guy is attacking women! Surprisingly enough, he refused to resign for a day or so after the incident became public. What made him change his mind? A gentle phone call from the national team's main sponsor, who said that it would be inappropriate for the Bolillo to continue in charge of the team. The ironic touch is that the main sponsor is Bavaria, the largest brewery in the country (and subsidiary of SAB Miller). That is, the main provider of alcohol in the country (and as such, arguably the main indirect responsible for violence against women in the country) made Bolillo reason about his doings. How about that??