Tag: mother earth

I dropped the salt.  I know, I know, it’s bad luck to spill a little salt.  Maybe the bad luck ends when the shaker breaks in half, pouring out its contents onto the counter and the floor, a million crystals mocking my clumsiness, one can hope anyway.  Normally something broken would have been thrown into the trash without a second thought, but not today.  

The night before the shaker broke, a few of us had casually discussed the end of the world, over supper.  Climate change is worsening, but I had somehow remained unaware of just how quickly and just how giant an impact this will have on humanity.  Ignorance turned into a feeling of impending doom as we discussed the worsening fires and lack of rainfall.  Ten years “they” say til we feel the harsh wrath of the earth, thirty years before we are likely fighting for existence.  No one knows the exact timeline, but the idea that there is one that expires at all and quite possibly in our life time is terrifying.  It feels irresponsible not to fix the shaker.  

Not fixing it may have imminent consequences.

As a country we are giving up plastic straws.  I too watched the video of the sea turtle with the straw painfully lodged in its nose, poor guy, but there’s no way sea turtles are constantly doing this and yet for that little guy and maybe a handful of his friends, we are doing it.  There are far more environmentally hazardous and unnecessary things.  Maybe we are just being eased into it, if we survive surrendering our plastic single-use straws, surely we can give more without altering our lives too greatly.  Single-use hangers for example, you only need one set of hangers.  After shopping, you take the clothing off the hanger and put it on a better hanger or into a drawer, where does the single use hanger go?  Certainly not the recycling, they don’t get recycled, believe me, we tried.  

Apparently recycling is just a feel-good activity anyway, to make us feel better about our copious amounts of waste products, as most of it is put into landfills.  

But imagine for a minute that “repaired” became the new trendy.  Our items would gather scars and character from their time with us, creating charming conversation pieces.  For instance:

“Please pass the salt”

“Here you are”

“Oh wow, what a charming salt shaker, what’s her story?”

My in-laws very generously lend us their camper trailer each year for my sibling camp out.  It’s perfect, fully stocked with all the necessities it makes packing easier, sleeping comfortable and undesirable weather bearable.  We made a meal, slapped the food onto the plates and the plates literally fell to pieces, right there on the tiny counter.  Just gave out from the weight of the toddler sized portion of food.  I thought this was next-level thriftiness, which is admirable in itself, but now I’m aware that saving free collectible dishes from Shreddies, circa 1985, is very environmentally friendly.  That dish far exceeded its life expectancy and the in-laws can feel good about having not wasted.  I guess this ought to be the trend.  

Waste not, want not, has long been forgotten, and certainly not well practiced here in the western world, not by my generation anyway.  In an age where things are cheaply mass produced and so easily replaced, that’s exactly what’s happening, replacing and not repairing, often replacing before it’s even required.  I’m guilty, so guilty.  I want to change and it begins today.   

We need to evolve or there may be catastrophic consequences. And I hope that all of our little efforts add up.

So I glued that big old piece of plastic back together.  I might even add some cute tape.  And if you’re ever at my house for supper and see that glued-up, taped-up piece of unwasted plastic, I will tell you about the day I feared for the end of humanity.  At the very least it will remind me to be more environmentally conscientious, to take better care of the Earth that cares for us.  

What’s the greenest thing you’ve done this week?