Tipping Points

by Brad Rowen

Anyone who’s watched a huge, carefully constructed domino palace fall into a pile of disjointed plastic knows it’s true: it is easier to destroy than to create. If we’re honest, we know it can also provide a certain rush. Just watch this video if you have any doubts. It’s shows 128,000 dominoes falling, setting a world record a few years ago. The video is just seven and a half minutes long. I can only guess what tiny fraction that is of the time it took to set up. One thousandth? One ten-thousandth?

Dominoes, it should be noted, are setup for the expressed purpose of seeing them fall. You can argue that the reward doesn’t match the effort, but the trade-off is clear. And it takes a certain strength of character to get through the occasional mishap. The patience of those who execute such phenomenal displays is entirely admirable, to be sure.

On the other hand, that admiration can fade with the nature of the task. At some point, our patient practitioner becomes a bit exasperating. That same concentration that makes dominoes so much fun may lead to a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive disorder if applied to folding the clothes or detailing your car.

Our appetite for destruction has limits too. Knocking over dominoes is fine. But a child who wants to see what happens when he puts a toy in the oven is unlikely to be rewarded. In fact, outside the world of dominoes we could probably graph a pretty clear relationship between value invested in an object and our joy in its destruction, with some intersection of these lines determining whether the destroyer is fun-loving or demented. Our worst judgements would no doubt be reserved for those who carelessly destroy things that they need, things that are important to their ongoing daily lives.

We’d be particularly incensed if someone destroyed something precious or something very old. No one wants to turn a pyramid into a drive-through falafel restaurant or sell raffle tickets to blow up the Rocky Mountains. In fact, the older it is, the harder it is to recreate, the crazier it is needlessly destroy it. If something takes hundreds of thousands of years to make, only fools would carelessly waste it, especially we could use less rare materials to produce the same result.

If you’re a regular reader here, you know the punchline already. Petroleum, a precious natural resource, requires the utmost patience to develop. Its timelines are geological, unfathomably long for mere mortals. And yet, so careless are we that we use it for everything—even something as fleeting as a plastic bottle that holds a drink of water. And we don’t do it just once, but 80 billion times a year.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can replace those scarce resources with plant fiber—grown in a process we can watch and repeat, year after year, with no diminishing returns. The Paper Water Bottle, like those dominoes, was designed to last just long enough—to provide satisfaction, without harming anything else in the process. That’s a Refreshing Alternative.