Ten tips to help our planet . . . revisited  Ten tips to help
our planet . . . revisited September 1, 2000  On the final page
of the calendar that Environmental Defense (formerly known as
the Environmental Defense Fund) sends to millions of potential
contributors, you’ll find a list of ten things you can do to
protect the environment. Not surprisingly, one of those things
is to support their organization. . . . and the other nine
points are just as dubious. ED’s list is reproduced below along
with a factual appraisal of each “tip.”  1. Recycle as much as
possible, newspapers, glass, plastic, and batteries.  Recycling
often makes sense, but mandatory recycling is usually a mistake.
For one thing, we don’t need to recycle everything. We aren’t
running out of room for our trash. (One expert, Clark Wiseman,
calculated that all the trash produced by the United States for
the next 1,000 years could fit in a landfill 44 miles square and
300 feet deep.) We aren’t running out of natural resources,
either. Nearly all r