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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. 

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Waste Not

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?