Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, April 19, 2004.

Here's an Earth Day question: Is there anything more hypocritical than a supposed environmentalist at spring cleaning time? Hmmm... Speaking as a supposed environmentalist, nothing is popping to mind -- especially when you come to know of my dark plan....

My family saves and reuses whatever we can, we recycle, we try to avoid excess packaging. But when push comes to shoving crappola in a trash can (as it often does when you own a home), something has got to give.

Still, it's a little ironic that, even as I dribble water out of a faucet to rub the scum off an aluminum foil yogurt container top so I can recycle it, there sits a ton of soaked and now fetid foam carpet backing in my basement window well that I fully intend to throw in a dumpster. And to be perfectly honest, I don't care where it goes. I just want it out of my window well.

How did it get there? A few weeks ago, during the big snow melt, somebody had unplugged the sump in our basement, and it flooded. We saved the carpet, but there was just no way to dry out and save the nice, cushy, premium backing that we had installed less than three months before. The kicker is that we won't pay for it till June when it will be lining a distant landfill.

So like most environmentalists, I don't have a problem with my garbage going to the dump -- it's other people's garbage I'm not so keen about. For the past couple of years, Michiganders have been somewhat put out by the fact that Canada, and the city of Toronto in particular, sends a great deal of their trash to our landfills. We don't understand nor care to understand the economics of why this is; we just don't much like the idea of it.

And in this week's comic, I connected that situation with the news of a Toronto firm being hired to study how to development an arts and entertainment district in Grand Rapids.

So my desire to deny my Canadian brother a place to rid himself of *his* sump-pump fiasco may make me a bit of a hypocrite, but I think my heart is in the right place. At the very least, I think I'm a step up from being a wonton litterer. If that public service advertisement of my youth with the Native American picking through the roadside litter and the tear sliding down his stern face taught me anything it's that "only you can prevent forest fires." No, wait, "reading is fundamental."... Uh, "it's nice to share"?... Now I've gotten it confused. I suppose I watched too much TV as a kid. Sigh. A mind is a terrible thing to waste....