Fiction or truth, the myth of the frog slowly boiling to death is thought provoking. As the story goes, if you drop a frog into a half inch of hot water, he'll jump right out of it as an immediate reaction to the heat. But if you place him in a half inch of cool water and slowly turn up the heat, he'll sit there until he dies from over-heating. The myth is interesting because it illustrates how living creatures can seccumb to a peril if it creeps up on them slowly enough.

We have three kids. At their diaper stage, we used a recyclable diaper service. We thought it was good for the environment and good for our kids. But let's examine what happens when just a portion of the population engages in "best practices" for the planet:

We effectively "diluted" the diaper pollution problem enough for it not to be the bigger issue it would have been had we simply tossed several more thousand diapers into landfills like most folks did. Perhaps all of us recyclable diaper people turned the issue -- in terms of political potency -- from a top priority to a medium priority; enough to make it an effective non-issue in terms of law making. Perhaps it would have been better to just let the problem create such a stink (no pun intended) that it would have been addressed more aggressively in Congress and laws would have been enacted.

A close friend of mine has been in the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) for over 12 years. He stands today clean, sober and successful today in start contrast to how things were 13 years ago. He tells me he began drinking heavily early. It took a few short years for his life to gegin to unravel and before he knew it, he was faced with the choice of dying or getting sober.

He was lucky he found the strength to give up the drink of course, but perhaps more lucky because the problem developed quickly enough for him to tackle it early -- before it destroyed his life. He tells me that saddest thing in AA is the arrival of the 63 year-old. By then, the guy would have drunk his way through several relationships, a career and the upbringing of his children, but with no chance to rebuild his life. Time has run out.

So are we doing ourselves a disfavor by "diluting" the global environment problem enough so that no one ever deals with it head on? Perhaps it would be better to simply ignore it until we crash.

"Fail early" is how mt friend Ross would put it.