Strategic materials

I am constantly amazed at our misuse of resources. Take aluminum, for example. This is a strategic material. We use it in our aircraft to defend America. We also package our beer and soda in it and then bury massive quantities of the empties in dumps. How did this all start? I have a CD from the 1950s with one of the first radio commercials for no deposit no return glass bottles. The announcer is positively ecstatic. No more bothersome returning empties to the store. Just throw ’em in the trash! I think I remember that it somehow felt wrong. It might have been 10 years later that we were told that aluminum cans made the beer taste more like on-tap — at least that was the claim. The fact that aluminum cans were lighter than glass bottles or steel cans, thus reducing shipping costs, was not mentioned so I guess it was not a big deal. Maybe it was. Nobody’s telling.Oil is finite. We use it to keep from freezing to death and we also fuel our aluminum planes with it. We fly those planes all over the country every day so that people can attend meetings, sell stuff and vacation at unnecessary distances. Most of this travel could easily be shortened, rerouted by a more efficient mode of travel or handled by phone or Internet.You might say, “Hey! The plane was already going there. I just rented one of the empty seats. A lot of people’s jobs rely on my traveling and I am just helping to drive/fly the economy. My intentions are the best.” Well, good intentions are still paving that famous road. The truth is that the actual traveler is often not in control of this; it is top management who decides, like the Roman Centurion in the Bible, who shall “cometh” and who shall “goeth,” and how far. We used to have a pretty good rail network that included that forgotten local workhorse, the inter-urban trolley, the big ones that ran on the rails from one large city to another, like from Hartford to Springfield. Stores, amusements and necessary services used to be located in close proximity to the rails. This clustering left much of the countryside open and suitable for farming and wildlife.One day we will wake up and discover that we are almost out of oil. Our steel cars, even with improved highway mileage, will be unable to get fuel sufficient to run any significant distance. What will we do? Well, we could stretch out the fuel economy by making our cars out of aluminum. Oh, wait a minute … Bill Abrams resides, and counts his cans and bottles, in Pine Plains.