Let me tell you a little something about the environment — something the “machine,” holed up in its corporate offices, supermarkets and functioning electrical grids, wants to hide from the people. There is a deeply insidious culture of waste that pervades cafeterias everywhere. And decent, Subaru-driving, “COEXIST” sticker-owning, Rainbow Bookstore-patronizing Madisonians are as much to blame as anyone else. They may not know it, but deep behind the fa?ade of respect for other ethnicities, fair trade and pot-smoke ridden “grassroots” gatherings in co-ops about “fighting the system,” these people subconsciously despise good old Mother Earth.

How?

They use lunch trays.

That’s right. Lunch trays are singlehandedly destroying the environment. Not only do these subtle prophets of the Apocalypse use plastic, but they use water as well, water that would be much better applied quenching the thirst of the Sahara’s occasional Elm tree or cooling the sunburned fur of ring-tailed lemurs which, incidentally, lunch trays have endangered to the point of extinction. Lunch trays have already proved themselves integral to every environmental crisis experienced by the modern world. How do you think crew members on the Exxon Valdez carried food to their tables? It certainly wasn’t by carrier pigeon.

My “colleague” Tom Schalmo will attempt to argue differently. High up on his tower of corporate hackery, he will try to tell you lunch trays are fine simply because it is difficult to carry all your food items in your hands. It is difficult to make all possible selections to accommodate your eating needs. But if you apply this ridiculous argument to similarly desperate situations, it doesn’t hold up. It was “difficult” to defeat the Nazis. It was “difficult” to defeat the Confederacy and slavery. But when the situation required it, brave individuals stood up for their morals. And they will do it again when lunch trays begin their assault on all we hold dear.

I can already hear the cries of outrage from the economic elite, quavering to defend their obscene subversion of our precious resources for their campaign against the rainforests. “Earth Day?” they will ask. “More like Earth lame.”

Many of the ignorant will wonder how trays can cause so much damage. After all, it’s just the thing you use to put food on while you are walking from the counter to your table, where your eco-friendly homies eagerly await your arrival so they can ask you about how Earth Day relates to Communism, right? Wrong.

There are very reputable studies which show a direct correlation between the number of trays on college campuses and the number of baby seals choking to death in oil-saturated waters somewhere off the coast of Alaska. Obviously this is a cause responsible American college students can respect. After all, you’re not for the death of baby seals, are you?

And while the illustrious Tom “I hate life on Earth” Schalmo can argue it is more convenient to have a suitable pretext for destroying the planet in the form of lunch trays, this is no reason to give credence to the most offensive rectangular piece of plastic ever conceived. Stand up for what is right. History (and a cute baby seal) is watching.

Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in economics. In his spare time he parks his canoe in front of oil tankers.