Not wasting time

Canyon lake has been opened with good weather for only a few weeks and already there is trash all around my swimming hole. It frustrates me, especially sense most of the trash is easily identifiable as coming from Mexican stores. I picked up several beer cans but as I did not have my trash picker-upper (I am sure thats the technical term) I am not touching the rest strewn about. The next time I head up there I will collect what I can with it.

I decided this year to collect and sell all the aluminum cans that I find. I have heard its going for a buck a pound at the recyclers. Of course I will go crazy if I don't figure out just how many crushed cans equal a pound but thats a simple thing to do one night.

I have always been of the opinion of "Do good deed and keep them to yourself." I think for special stuff that is still good advice but this year I am going to let people know how much trash I collect on a weekly basis out there and in other places in Tonto National Park and let the park service know about it. Not to rub their face in it, they work hard out there; but to let them know there is need for a trash container in that area and that there are people like me who are doing what they can to keep the area beautiful.

Being Green

The real crux of Compass Points Right is to focus on being Green and being a Conservative. It's been hard to go between the 'cut', 'paste', 'link' format and putting my own thought and observations I have had for years, finally to keyboard.

The nice part of this process now is that instead of having to collate all these thoughts of mine, other much more prominent thinkers are doing it and for the big theory or green conservation I can leave to better men and women.

Newt Gingrich is a lightening rod for controversy, but none deny he is a visionary thinker of the conservative party. He listed these values in 2007 as a way to introduce or reinvent how conservative should view and discuss the advancement of being 'green'.

Values of Green Conservatism

1. Green conservatism favors clean air and clean water.
2. Green conservatism favors maximum biodiversity as a positive good.
3. Green conservatism favors minimizing carbon loading in the atmosphere as a positive public value.
4. Green conservatism is pro-science, pro-technology, and pro-innovation.
5. Green conservatism believes that green prosperity and green development are integral to the successful future of the human race.
6. Green conservatism believes that economic growth and environmental health are compatible in both the developed and developing world.
7. Green conservatism believes that we can realize more positive environmental outcomes faster by shifting tax code incentives and shifting market behavior than is possible from litigation and regulation.

Much of this is a top down mentality. This is a policy shift meant for the right wing party as a whole which is really where Newt is best suited. Conservatives, Republicans are the party of Theodore Roosevelt. The party that created the EPA and the clean water act and the clean air act. It seems that in the last thirty years the right has done everything possible to separate itself from environmental concerns and the left has done nothing but use scare tactics and fear to co-op new recruits. But somewhere in between the businessman and the Sierra Club is the rest of us wanting to do the best we can for the future.