StalkMarket is a leading provider of eco-friendly disposable tableware, flatware and food packaging. The company’s product line includes a wide array of plates, bowls, serving trays, to-go containers, sandwich boxes, utensils and cups made from sustainable, biodegradable plant materials. All StalkMarket products are compostable.

The majority of products are made of a sugarcane paperboard called bagasse. The raw materials we use to make bagasse are the upcycled byproduct of sugar refineries. Traditionally, this material was discarded by burning.

StlakMarket provides a vastly superior alternative to disposables made from plastic and polystyrene (Styrofoam) products. The overwhelming majority of the environmentally-conscious community embraces StalkMarket as a legitimately green company that provides an elegant solution to a daunting problem. We’ve even been endorsed by Sierra Magazine in 2005 for our efforts.

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Thank you for welcoming me back after an extended hiatus travelling our great American countryside.  Burned out from the stresses of the Sust Enable project, my partner Scott and I took off for the great wilds of U.S. National Parks in early August.  I haven’t written a blog since, as my adventures swept me far from the reaches of the Internet, for the most part.  Now I am back in Pittsburgh, not living sustainably, yet still reeling from the life lessons reaped from the past four months.

I anticipated having a slew of breathtaking photographs to offer you, alongside commentary from the trip in which I reflected on our often-severed connection with nature, and the deep wisdom such a connection provides.  Instead, one night while we camped in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, our video and digital camera were stolen from the glovebox of Scott’s car.  In the middle of a peaceful campsite, in which the sense of goodwill invoked a dozen campers to leave their car doors unlocked that night, a band of thiefs took advantage, slipped in after dark, and robbed a handful of people… not only of material possessions, but of their precious trip memories.

I wept inconsolably when I learned that the camera which held our trip photographs had been taken from us.  I cared little for the money-cost of these items, but I couldn’t stop hurting from the void that the thief left in me–having robbed me of the potential for life-long memories.

Memories surely live on in one’s mind… but as an avid student of the sciences, psychology easily reminds me that minds distort experiences.  I was hoping to use the photographs from our trip as a guideline for revisiting the feelings and sights that this wonderful trip stirred in me.  That hope is gone now, exchanged for a fleeting handful of cash to another.

And so, in the middle of my meditations on how the entire human race might be unified if we each and all had the opportunity to pause in the arms of nature’s bounty… I was sharply reminded with a single malicious act… that we have much further to go before then.

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