Green Options

Some of you may already be aware of the craze that is sweeping the Feudal lands. I am sure your masters and lords have taken the time to inform you, toiling serfs, of an art form delicate in its composition, fantastic in its successful rendition, and so green that burying it within your rice paddies and wheat fields would yield no corruption of the soil. For those still ignorant of this most glorious and holy art forms I submit to you the wonder of the far east: the Mandala!

It’s election season ladies and gentlemen! I mean, well, it’s been election season since the beginning of the year but now we’re into the final rounds; the all-out, smack-down, Thunderdome two-men-enter-one-man-leaves, thick of the fight. What better way to voice your support for your particular candidate and focus attention on the issues you care about most than some DIY election crafts?

My first piece of political craftiness will show your above-average grasp of U.S. politics (by knowing at least one of the candidates for president). You’ll certainly be fashionable if you sport these beautiful earrings blessed with the face of a possible U.S. president-to-be!

What better way to start making art out of your supposedly useless junk than to learn from our forefathers (and mothers)? Our wasteful generation, so used to disposing of whatever we are bored with or whose intended purpose has been fully utilized, is just now learning to maximize the resources we possess. Our grandparents, of course, had been recycling long before polar bears started shopping for floaties. Of course, they turned their Oats and Barley boxes into lampshades out of necessity, not green sensibilities.
The wonderful think about folk art is its utter versatility. You can use anything you own, broken or intact. You can super glue some broken plate pieces, old car keys, a car battery, ten randomly bent paper clips, and a torn washcloth together to make a diorama of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Some of you may have the unfortunate affliction that causes everything in your house to break. This problem, commonly known as “Children” can turn everything you own, expensive or priceless, into useless junk. Of course, these debris can be collected and welded together into art that can awe your friends and strike fear into your progeny!

There has been a resurgence of this sort of behavior as of late. All around the world people are taking household items and squishing them together in a global mosaic of junk art. With them leading the way we can all test the limits of our creativity, ingenuity, and the patience of our significant others. (I will warn you now, ask before you start rummaging through their junk drawers. Sometimes a screw driver or Indian penny has more sentimental and/or monetary value than you realize.)

Living in the Western world, we Americans aren’t quite attuned to the disposal of used chopsticks. It simply isn’t that big of a problem, as we hurl food into our gaping maws with spiky metal shovels. Generally speaking, the only time we chop down forests in order to feed ourselves is when McDonald’s expands its beef production into the Amazon. The Chinese, our brothers and sisters across the great blue expanse, have an additional problem: chopsticks. They produce approximately 45 billion pairs a year, most of which being as disposable as a Uwe Boll movie. That amounts to about 25 million trees a year.

Let’s face it, we are perhaps the most wasteful society the world has ever seen. Earlier civilizations would look at our heaping, rotting, contaminating piles of rubbish and salivate at the vast wealth contained ever so compactly beneath the ground. We live in a nation so embedded with wealth that we crumple and toss everything from still usable essentials (food, clothing, furniture) to items which would be priceless in earlier eras (or in some countries).

We’ve created, through the ingenuity of [...]