The infamous stand up comedian, George Carlin, has his own inimitable style of using caustic wit to gain stark insight into the human condition. In a recent act (I couldn't recall or find out when & where, so if anyone knows please email me), Carlin mocks the notion that we can "save the planet." YouTube.com carries it here (warning, lots of expletives!), starting at minute 5:00:

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth...plus plastic.

The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...

And lo! Some kid in Waterloo just figured out a way for The Earth to degrade plastic bags, in three months! From the May 22 Waterloo Record, "WCI Student Isolates Microbe That Lunches on Plastic Bags"

Daniel [Burd], a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

"Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," he said. "One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags."

The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

The full story goes into interesting detail about Burd's experiments and results. The upshot: an inexpensive way to deal with plactic bags instead of banning them along with all their conveniences. The earth...plus plastic, indeed!

Thanks to Ben Powell and Pierre Lemieux for the pointers--and fun discourse!