Your Daily Coffee Ration - Save The Planet?

On this day, November 29th, 1942, coffee was rationed in the United States. What would you do without your cuppa java?

This past weekend I bought, for a pitance, 4 steel pennies, despite the passing of Buy Nothing Day. I reasoned that the purchase of those odd zinc-coated steel pennies would remind me that the previous American generation willingly reused and recycled many commodities during WWII, and limited their personal consumption to sustain the war effort, which is a pittance compared to today's deplorable measures of consuption. My Dad and Uncles often talked of dragging wagons and carts around their southeastern Idaho hometown collecting glass, metals and other items that could be recycled and reused to aid the country and the troops abroad.

Question: Should it take a protracted foreign war to convince this country to change its consumption habits? Answer: No, the current state of the world economy should give us pause enough. The status of depleted oil, natural gas, coal, and recent global patterns of the consumption of cement, lumber, raw energy, technology, and other essentials for *unlimited growth* should shock this country into a reconsideration of its fundamental ideas of the "American dream" and our government/business aliance's agenda to spread these ultimately unsustainable ideas into the world, in the name of freedom, commerce, free trade, and shall we say, in the parlance of our Administration, democracy. Of course, this democracy/unsustainable business meme, spread large in the world already, is already beginning to bite US in the proverbial behind. China and India are happily at the cusp of their long-planned-for bid to become major players in the world economy, and the world is witnessing regional ecologic destruction as these and other up-and-coming nations exercise their growing strength and test their economic muscle. The future looks grim, and US goals and timeworn policies are not the solution.

tags: coffee, US, sustainability, China, India, cement, economy, oil, buy nothing day