An upside of the recession is that since we're consuming less stuff, we're producing less trash. As noted in the Business section of Saturday's Post-Gazette, for the second year in a row, America's annual garbage output has dropped by a few million tons.

We're producing less trash? Really? You couldn't prove it by me.

I can't speak for the millions of other volunteers who were out Saturday morning for the Great American Cleanup or Pittsburgh's Spring Redd Up -- pick your cause and moniker -- but it's possible that there's less trash for the nation's garbage professionals to weigh because most of it's getting dumped on my block.

Specifically, it's getting dumped behind the fence at the playground up the street. Fishing out empty Doritos bags partly filled with fetid water gave me lots of time to reflect on poverty, the second law of thermodynamics and the breathtaking rise of America's new fundamentalist religion -- environmentalism.

Or it could've just been the heat. After dreary weeks of late-winter weather, Nature chose to rush from March chill to July grill in one week, broiling us weekend trash-pickers by mid-morning.

I'd signed up, along with my community group, because of the local "Redd Up" appeal. I "eat local," I clean local (pardon the grammar -- it ain't mine). But if one who proudly eats locally produced food is a locavore, is one who cleans her street and tells you about it a loca-bore? A loca-Gore?

God forbid. And there I go, mentioning Al Gore and God practically in the same sentence, their names separated only by a question mark.

But Mr. Gore's no god, though he's become rich as god, acting as high priest of a religion that allows no skepticism, brooks no criticism and acknowledges no contrary facts. He thunders at us to repent of our sins against the Earth and atone for them by buying indulgences -- excuse me, "carbon offsets" -- possibly in the form of donations to his climate-change foundation.

It's richly ironic that the same people who love to lampoon Christian fundamentalism have swallowed the global-warming theology of Al Gore -- crook, line and sinker. The new "Flat Earth-ers" are "Fried Earth-ers."

Even as the faulty science behind "An Inconvenient Truth" is quietly corrected and the puzzling complexities of humans' relationship to the climate more rationally explored, the simplistic Gore dogma spreads like kudzu. As a safely secular religion, it finds government hothouses a friendly clime -- from public schools to Pittsburgh City Council, which passed a unanimous resolution urging citizens to observe "Earth Hour" last month by turning off their lights for one hour on a Saturday evening.

Me, I turn off lights and electronic appliances all the time just to conserve -- both my meager paycheck and the planet's fossil fuels: "Waste not, want not." Can't I be a tree-hugger without being a tree-worshipper?

Fervent modern environmentalism got kick-started in 1962 with the publication of Pittsburgher Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." Her book led to the banning of DDT, a pesticide used agriculturally in the U.S. but used to fight malaria worldwide.

Forty years later, critics say the DDT ban is responsible for the malaria deaths of as many as 30 million people, because rich white countries where the disease had been eradicated through better public hygiene exported their ban to undeveloped nations with few if any alternatives. Neocolonialism, anyone?

As we embark on new crusades to supposedly end global warming and find new earth-sensitive energy supplies, maybe we ought to pause and consider the practical impact on the world's poor. Lowering carbon emissions in countries where most of the population doesn't have electricity? Pushing ethanol for American cars when the overproduction of corn creates pesticide run-off that poisons the water table and raises staple food prices for the poor?

What's needed in the face of the new orthodoxy is a healthy skepticism -- and a sober reminder that, to paraphrase the second law of thermodynamics, "everything falls apart."

That law was much in evidence Saturday morning in my neighborhood. Fighting destruction and decay is an uphill battle. Once the weeds and the trash go unchecked for a while, they start winning the war. The weeds spread and attract more trash -- including the thoughtless discards from suburbanites' cars.

The only antidote to decay and disregard anywhere is the human will -- a renewable energy source. We turn back destruction, whether intended or unintended, one bag of trash and one impertinent question at a time.