There are three main things that I wanted to develop further in Macbride’s Introduction to Recycling Reconsidered: The anti-toxics movement of the 70s, the unbalanced distribution of wealth in the US and how it affects the zero waste movement, and power diversion tactics between Covanta and the IRC.
It was difficult to find information on the antitoxic movement, everything I found was brief and to read more involved buying a some book or other. In Macbride’s introduction, she talks about the antitoxic movement in the 70s and 80s as laying the foudations for groups to come. In his book The Environmental Movement in Ireland, Liam Leonard discusses how during this movement, environmental issues received world-wide coverage from the media. He also explains that the anti-toxics movement fought along other movements such as the the anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons movements. This makes sense because eliminating both war and nuclear weapons would consequently make for a better environment. Ultimately, the anti-toxics movement fought to end the use of pesticides such as “agent orange” which was linked to radiation poisoning. It was interesting to see how it wasn’t really until the 70s, that the US started to fully understand the imminent problems with the environment and started to do something to change it.
I think that the unbalanced distribution of wealth is an impending problem and I think is more closely related to environmental problems. On page 2 Macbride briefly mentions the US’ great wealth but how unevenly it is distributed. She basically stops there but this idea is one that really interests me. Some studies done by economist show that the US’s distribution of wealth is equivalent to that of some African Dictatorships. The worst part of it is that many American are completely unaware of this. This infographic does a very good job of describing Americans perceived idea of distribution of wealth versus the truth. Now you’re probably asking what does any of this have to do with the environment. Well as bad as it may sound, it is much harder to “go green” when you are living below the poverty line. The concern for many families today is not really with the environment but how they are going to feed their families. So in many cases it is easier and more cost effective for families to go to places like Walmart and spend their paychecks on cheap junkfood, not necessarily because they want to but becuase this is cheaper than going to their local farmer’s market and buy all organic. While this is happening, the rich are going out and buying new cars faster than they can be produced. There is a huge disparity but they both result in the wrong kind of consumerism. If the gap can be balanced I think that this could change. 
I really enjoyed reading Macbride’s descriptions of diversions of power. The one that really struck me was her third dimension of power. It reminded me a lot of the IRC. Macbride describes this as basically when a group, “A” has enough control of the knowledge that group “B” receives, that B completely acts against it’s own interests. For some reason this really reminded me of the IRC. I think that the IRC is really acting upon the agenda of larger corporations such as Coca-Cola and Walmart, they just don’t know it. The IRC acted like Coca-Cola and Walmart had nothing but good intentions, however, like Covanta they are both businesses and at the end of the day they want to make money. So I think that they also have an agenda which the IRC is unknowingly buying into.
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