To: Ben Bradshaw, M.P.
House of Commons
London, SW1A 0AA
Education Sunday, 12 February 2006
(Your ref: #/**********)
Dear Ben,
It was good to know that a copy of my recent letter to Ruth Kelly reached you safely. You ask me how you may help.
Firstly, by focussing clearly and steadfastly on the crucially central and ever increasing importance of ecology, understood in its proper, deepest and, by the same token all encompassing and widest sense as Tao, 'suchness', Present. In that respect, beautytruegood.co.uk is your own most convenient access to this particular constituent's Internet life. However, best now "take the tour" first - Just place your mouse in the centre of the horizontal rainbow you see running across the bottom of your opening screen, and click on "A New Adventure".
Because many householders leave out a disporoportionately large amount of waste to be collected each week, some want this actively discouraged in the interests of planetary survival by levying a charge for all domestic waste above some specified quantity. Instead, I suggest you and all your colleagues agree to attach an appropriate price-tag to most of this waste at both of its, I believe, primary sources: (1) needlessly elaborate or fancy packaging, and (2) excessive advertizing. All individuals and groups originating posted (or otherwise from house to house delivered) unsolicited business invitations, commercial advertisements, special offers, promotions, appeals, etc., registered charities not excluded urgently need to be legally obliged,with each individual item, to provide the householder with a suitably addressed FREEPOST envelope (or other appropriate container) for its much more ecologically sane return to source, if not needed by or otherwise of interest to any particular recipient. More than 50% of the "waste" I leave out is stuff of this kind! Given the multi-facetted educational advantages implementing any such proposal implies, I invite you also (without another paper-chase) to draw the contents of my current home-page to the attention of the Member of Parliament for Bolton West. I hope both of you can make time to "take the tour".
I currently avoid including my own email details in any hyperlinked or otherwise easily electronically read and manipulated format within my websites, because, sadly, that seeming convenience generates too much "spam". I also dislike any "automatic electronic acknowledgment of reception" coming to me in response to any of my emails; even if, for legal reasons, sometimes almost unavoidable, this dehumanising usage clutters up and so inevitably slows down Internet traffic for us all. Good legislation in this area is hard to conceive in any detail, and anything you can do to help will be of great and lasting benefit.
When I wrote to Ruth Kelly, I mentioned Bolton's heraldic motto: Supera Moras or, among its other locally traditional translations, "Vanquish the Turks". So, surely, it now must be, time permitting, for each of us a valuable learning experience as well as a tremendous joy to read or re-read a book Waterstone's are now stocking: the 50th anniversary enhanced new edition of Willard R. Trask's English translation of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis - The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003).
With best wishes,
(Signed)