Ask just about any citizen at the Recycling Center how long they have been recycling, why they do it and how they would feel if their recyclables weren’t being recycled, and you get remarkably similar answers.

“As long I’ve lived in Bloomington -- six years,” said Cathleen Paquet, while her friend Elizabeth Gibbs nodded in agreement.

We gnomes stay away from roads, as a rule, but there are so many roads now that sometimes we have to cross them, or walk parallel to them, to get from one wooded place to another.

I'm sure you have never seen a roadkilled gnome. We're too smart to let ourselves get hit or run over.

The worst thing that happens to us on roadsides is that sometimes we get hit by Budweiser cans and McDonald's wrappers that motorists throw our of their car windows.

Steve Volan was the only Monroe County Solid Waste Management District board member to give a straight answer when asked if glass and other materials collected at the Recycling Center and rural drop-off sites are recycled or landfilled.

Board member Patrick Stoffers said he believes glass is being recycled but couldn't say for sure.

"Do I know?" he said. "I have never gotten in my vehicle and followed a truck to its final destination."

We gnomes, guardians of Mother Earth and her secrets and treasures, didn't have to worry much about this thing called "energy" in the Olden Times. We never even heard of the word until about the 1600s, and then it just meant, uh, the inclination to get up and go.

Getting up and going in those days was a bigger deal than it is now, because you didn't "go" in your house. You went outdoors to the privy or into the bushes. On cold days we called it "breaking frost," and it wasn't a peasant way to start the day. But it was necessary.

Now "energy" has become a primary concern of us gnomes, because you folks discovered fossil fuels and the uses for it, and in a mere two or three centuries used up most of it, creating shortages, oil wars, global warming and the economic impact of $90-a-tank gasoline fill-ups -- none of which we gnomes had ever heard of or imagined in the thousands of years of our existence living under tree roots in the quiet woods.

Now we have to think about "energy" matters all the time, because you madly consuming humans have brought us close to the brink of extinction by your profligate squandering of fuel energy.

The Farmers Market may be the only place in town on Saturday mornings that is busier than the Recycling Center on South Walnut Street.

But while the environmentally conscious hordes that inundate the center with glass, plastic, cardboard and other materials believe their meticulously sorted household refuse will be remanufactured into new products, there is no guarantee that they will.

"If it's being landfilled, then the city should know that and be communicating that to the residents and businesses so that we are not wasting our time separating trash for no reason," one concerned citizen familiar with the situation said in an e-mail to the Alternative.

We gnomes are here to protect our home, Mother Earth.

Being human (sort of), we understand that the earth is meant to be used. But not to be overused. We try to protect it from overuse. Our motto is: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

For example, we gnomes can give many reasons not to build new roads.

The best reason is that you can already get from anywhere to anywhere else in America. Anyplace there's any reason to go to, there' already a road to it.

I ran across a graph the other day, posted on an Internet forum. It showed, in stark form, the juxtaposition between what we (meaning our federal government) spent last year on research and development of differing types of energy vs. what we spent prosecuting the war in Iraq.

Along the bottom of the graph were little centimeter-high bars representing solar, nuclear, coal and other fossil fuel research. And then there was another bar, about 2 feet tall (at least on my Apple laptop), and that bar was Iraq. (See Solar Power Rocks).

The war in Iraq is costing us about $120 billion dollars a year. In contrast, we spend less than $500 million a year on finding ways of powering the world without having to resort to using oil, purchased from people who hate us.

First, let me introduce myself.

I'm a gnome. I write. Therefore, I am a gnome de plume.

If you know anything about gnomes, you know that we are earth-dwellers. We live in the woods, sometimes under the roots of trees.

You know that we are legendary as guardians of secret treasures. Most people presume that "treasures" means gold, silver, jewels, Rolexes, gallons of gas and other expensive crap. Wrong. You really don't know what the treasures are unless you're an Insider, like us.

The day after John McCain flew to Canada to glorify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 73-year-old Rosie Edwards repeatedly laughed about her flood-ravaged home in Martinsville.

"I've cried all I can cry," the grandmother of 55 grand and great-grandchildren said on June 21 in her moldy, now-gutted home of six years. "I've lost everything."

Just across State Road 37, which Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and his Democratic opponent Jill Long Thompson envision as an extension of the Interstate 69 NAFTA Highway, Bill Bergman likewise chuckled. He became a minor media star after painting "Mitch, Make Me an Offer?" on the side of his home and signed it "I-69 Backer."

"If I don't hear from him soon, it's going to be 'Ditch Mitch' on the roof," said Bergman, who sees I-69 as "part of progress."

Lately I've been feeling like a pre-creepy Michael Jackson. You know, the dude with the Afro who could Moonwalk.

The planning and the damage done

Half a century ago, California realized it had created a problem. Through an intensive system of government suburban-automotive subsidies, lawmakers had created an intensely lucrative market for land speculation -- far beyond the traditional cores of California's cities. In the hopes of efficiently channeling rural residents into the city for shopping, cultural activities and employment, they began building an elaborate network of automotive highways.

And, in the hope of building that rural population base, which would come into the city and thereby vitalize both, they extended traditional urban services, such as water and sewer, far beyond the city center.

The result was a love-letter to the God of Unintended Consequences. The highways, instead of funneling people into the cities, became a backwards conduit out of the cities, particularly for middle class and affluent white Americans.