* Being extremely allergic to poison oak, when I was invited by an activist to spy out a West Virginian mountaintop removal mine (see II:117), I bought the cheapest daypack I could, to spare from contamination the one I generally used. The new pack’s substance consisted of Chinese polyethylene. Its zipper was some other kind of plastic. Surprisingly enough, after three years of heavy use (and my daughter’s teenaged contempt), this object retained its structural integrity, with the exception of the zipper, which had begun to fail. If I took the pack to a repair establishment I would pay far more than the $20 it had cost. If I threw it away, that would “waste carbon.” If I kept using it, sooner or later my laptop would fall out and hit concrete, maybe fatally. Reader, what would you have done?