Fantastic Plastic Millenium

Among mounds of inaugural coverage the past few days comes a memorable comment that the New Millenium, scheduled to begin with the year 2000, will actually begin now, with Obama as our leader and the second Teflon president home, home, home on the ranch. To honor that thought, lets segue to the life of a regular plastic bag - the kind you see flying in the air at the bus stop and in football stadiums - made of polyethylene. Every year, more than 500 billion plastic bags are distributed. Less than 3% are recycled. They can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade, emitting harmful greenhouse gases in the process. One bag. One thousand years. There must be a cloth bag cool enough to carry in the grocery store. Or you could just think of George Bush every time you see a bag of air floating overhead, and vow not to let it happen again.

A New Epoch Upon Us?

Remember the Pleistocene epoch - the "glacial age" when Earth was repeatedly frozen, scraped, cooled and re-frozen? Epochs, eras, periods - these are terms remembered fondly, but barely, from high school or college. Well, the news is out. We have begun a new epoch. It seems humans have made such an impact on our planet that we have now departed the Holocene epoch and begun the Anthropocene. This was determined by a team from the Geological Society of London after examining transformed patterns of sediment, distruptions to the carbon cycle and wholesale changes to plants and animals. We humans have so changed the landscape that we now need a new name for it. And some say they do not play a part in creating history. We all do. And we all did. Let's make it a good one.