We Can Do Better. We Have To Do Better.

It’s the end of spring cleaning week, the week our city purges their unwanted items and piles them onto the curb, in hopes that someone will claim our household trash for their treasure. Although it is a mostly green initiative, giving our unwanted items a second chance at life, it’s an impressive display of our wastefulness. The unclaimed items, making up the vast majority, will be conveniently removed and disposed of — never thought of again.

It used to feel like a welcome decluttering, cleansing even, this year feels different. Climate change news stories are circulating through my mind. My step mother pointed at the salal that grows wild on their property, indicating its colour. Salal, a bush native to western North America, is green year round, but now its thick leaves are dark brown and crunchy. Google confirms the browning is not limited to this area. I wonder what that means for the birds and bears that eat the berries, for the creatures that find refuge in their branches and for the mushrooms that grow in their shade. Small ponds are drying up faster than usual, disrupting frogs and salamanders from completing their transformation, dying before they can search for a new place to live. These are just two circumstances I can document with my own eyes. Mother Earth is warning us. While causing the extinction of other species, we are dangerously close to causing our own. My daughters are five, three and five months, I need to do better for them, before Earth becomes completely inhospitable towards us all.

We are not living sustainably, we haven’t for generations. We love our stuff — especially cheap stuff. We were all raised to be good to the Earth. In primary school we all pledged to recycle, reduce and reuse, it all felt so promising and yet it all rings so hollow now. Why didn’t they grab us by the ankles, hoist us into the air and make us watch as they dumped our “disposable” things into the Earth — piles upon piles of it — until our beings filled with dread and we promised to forgo our cheap plastic junk? Why didn’t some Christmas Carol-esque angel guide show us what catastrophe awaited us after decades of careless waste? Maybe they tried and we were too distracted by our things or we just didn’t care. 

We need to add “do without” to the ol’ recycle, reduce, reuse adage. I don’t want to buy anything new, like ever. Although I wish I had made this decision after my hair dryer started smoking in an exhausted defiance of years of overuse, I’m sticking to it. Like everything else, I’ll simply toss it in the garbage, but this time there will be no google search, no amazon order — I’m trying to be better.

We are enslaved to consumerism. We work hard and we earn enough extra money to purchase new things — we “deserve” it. And then we need more, because styles have changed and our cheap broken items have been discarded or our fully functional items have become obsolete so we dispose and shop again, creating a need for more work and fuelling the market for cheap stuff. We have willingly jumped on this giant hamster wheel, specifically designed for us (smart ads) and we run, all while destroying the Earth and simultaneously giving ourselves anxiety, simply because we have too much stuff. Apathy and ignorance are killing us. We have to do better.

What do you think they will say about us, millions of years after our passing — the self induced extinction of humankind? What will they make of us when evolution has breathed life into another self aware species capable of exploring Earth’s history? What will they learn from our mistakes? What will they make of our homes packed with things, right beside other homes packed with the exact same things? What will they make of the fences that separated us, loudly marking what belongs to us, as if this Earth and her kindnesses were ever ours to divide? What will they make of our vast garbage heaps, buried not so discreetly just below her surface? What will they make of our willingness to pollute our Earth for a few dollars or a few moments of enjoyment? 

Humankind, victims of vanity, independent to a detriment and consumed by convenience. 

I can’t make up for years of impulsive purchases, and irresponsible wastefulness, but I can do better right now — so I will.