This is sort of a cop-out as a blog post, but I really think that the Onion captures the destructive force of nonchalance and false justification.
Click here to read the Jan 19, 2010 article: 'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder
It's funny because nearly every single one of us is guilty of at least one of those thoughts -- and we know it. It's not the behavior that really needs attention, it's the attitude behind it. Once you turn nonchalance into a sincere care for the Earth, you won't need to force behaviors down throats in order to get people to choose what's best for themselves. Recycling and reducing consumption will be an absolute must, and it will be by popular demand.
That's what the Earth really needs. It really just needs its people to care about it. A lot. Maybe just as much as - or more than - they care about themselves.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
A happy little joyful thing
A monarch caterpillar!
Which I found at work. (I'm a part-time naturalist.) (Which is not the same as being a nudist, which one or two of the pastors at church may erroneously believe.)
I get real wrapped up in how terrible everything is going for the environment, and I'm pretty sure that's not really healthy. So it's good when I just get a little moment to just feel some joy without any guilt or anger attached to it.
And look! There it is. A little bit of joy, just crawling along a leaf of milkweed. He gets to eat, and eat, and eat, and then he melts down and re-forms and BAM, butterfly wings. And let's face it, no one else could pull off that fashion statement. Just sayin'.
Which I found at work. (I'm a part-time naturalist.) (Which is not the same as being a nudist, which one or two of the pastors at church may erroneously believe.)
I get real wrapped up in how terrible everything is going for the environment, and I'm pretty sure that's not really healthy. So it's good when I just get a little moment to just feel some joy without any guilt or anger attached to it.
And look! There it is. A little bit of joy, just crawling along a leaf of milkweed. He gets to eat, and eat, and eat, and then he melts down and re-forms and BAM, butterfly wings. And let's face it, no one else could pull off that fashion statement. Just sayin'.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Corporate Lies
Today, I took an hour to enjoy the weather. Hurricane Earl swooped by last week, and ever since, it's been windy, dry, and decidedly NOT boiling hot. So it actually feels like autumn. I really love autumn. Mostly what I love is going hiking along streams or creeks in autumn. It's something about the wind and the water moving, and the leaves blowing in the wind and falling in the creek, and everything pretty and jolly but kind of melancholy all at once.
So I came home, feeling like planet Earth is pretty cool, and I decided to go tend my gosh-darn compost for once. I started composting about a year ago. I live in a row of townhouses with about ten square feet of backyard, so a for-real compost heap is more or less out of the question. But I do have a little space out there, and that's all I need. I got two five-gallon buckets from Home Depot, drilled drainage holes in the bottom and aeration holes in the sides along the top, and set 'em on some bricks (for aeration) under the deck. They're hardly noticeable (not even smellable, either) and it cost all of $10. As a result of composting, too, my garbage never smells -- I mostly only throw away the occasional sheet of plastic packaging. I feel pretty smug when I think about them composters.
Not only did I have to make them, I had to learn how to compost. Because having a composter and learning how to compost are actually two different things. There are rules to things going in the composter. Like, more "dries" than "wets," more "browns" than "greens," no dairy and no meat, only raw things. Oh, and ya gotta stir it up every day, for those little containers.
Now, do I stir it every day? No. Maybe like every week. I'm not a compost saint, unfortunately. But whatever. Basically, it goes like this: put wet stuff in the repurposed yogurt container 'till it's full, then take that out to the compost bucket. Stir it up when I get around to it. Dump dry leaves in there every once in awhile.
Oh, the dry leaves are what makes it great, though. I was thinking about how autumn is going to help me out with my dry leaf stash. You can evidently use straw, or even newspaper, for "dry" things, to keep the moisture level. (I've heard it's supposed to be "like a damp sponge.") But I just use dry leaves that I keep in some garbage bags in the garage. And man, those leaves smell really great. I'm not kidding. It's like potpurri. So I'm excited about having more dry leaves to keep in my garage.
Anyway, I was in there composting today, and I noticed something. The stupid Sun Chips bag STILL has not composted.
I think I put it in there before Shane left in July. If you've bought Sun Chips in the last year, you know what I mean. They did something to make their bags SUPER CRINKLY LOUD. BUT, they say, IT'S BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPOSTABLE!!
Apparently the statement only applies under very specific conditions. I want you to know that my composting repertoire is expansive... an entire spaghetti squash, pumpkin skin, cobs from corn, eggshells... so baby, it's you, not me. Darn you, Sun Chips. Darn you and your stupid loud bags that don't even compost under conditions you can recreate on planet Earth.
Well, anyway. That was corporate lie #1.
Corporate lie #2 isn't so much a lie as... the Money Mailer people trying to be misleading. I've entered another phase of trying to minimize my junk mail, and I've done pretty good. I called the number you can call to have credit card companies quit sending you stuff (1-888-567-8688, read about that here if you didn't know), and I even got those junk newspapers to quit arriving at my door (the solution was a 2'x3' sign taped to my garage door: DO NOT DELIVER NEWSPAPERS HERE).
Then I got the Money Mailer. Oh, man. It irks me because it's all just designed to entice you into spending money, not really saving you anything. I'm a freakishly conservative spender, so I hate the Money Mailer as a matter of that principle as well as the environmental front.
It says (in size 4 font on the very bottom) that you can go to their website to remove your address from the mailing list. Yay, says I! I'll go do that! So I go do it. And right on the site is this little plea from the poor, poor corporation that says: "Before submitting your information, please take a moment to review the impact of direct mail and myths and realities about advertising mail and the environment."
I think of myself as open-minded, so I decided to try to read what they had to say as objectively as I could. And it was really hard and I didn't actually read it with any objectivity 'till about the third time around. But I think I did it. I decided, just for fun, to see what exactly they were saying.
Here is one of their claims:
"Discarded direct mail represents just 2.4% of municipal solid waste, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the recycling recovery rate has grown nearly 700% since 1990."
1) The EPA reported in 2008 that Americans generated about 250 million tons of trash (municipal solid waste). 54% of that (135 million tons) actually went to the landfill; the rest of it was recycled and composted. I'm not sure as to whether they meant MSW that went to the landfill, or total MSW. But let's be generous and assume it was MSW that made it to the landfill (because we're nice people, really). 2.4% of 135 million is 3.24 million. (Did I do that math right?) So, 3 and a quarter million tons of trash is like, no big deal, apparently.
[If you're wondering -- using the other figure, it's 6 million tons.]
2) Any avid environmentalist will tell you that the saying is "Reduce, reuse, recycle," in that order, because the terms decrease in effectiveness in that order. The best thing you can do is reduce your waste. The second-best is to reuse. The third-best thing is recycling, and some people (me included) will gently remind you that recycling is really not doing as much as you believe it's doing.
Even though I was completely convinced by this fabulously clever information that I should definitely continue to receive the Money Mailers that I never even open, I decided to take myself off the list anyway.
So I came home, feeling like planet Earth is pretty cool, and I decided to go tend my gosh-darn compost for once. I started composting about a year ago. I live in a row of townhouses with about ten square feet of backyard, so a for-real compost heap is more or less out of the question. But I do have a little space out there, and that's all I need. I got two five-gallon buckets from Home Depot, drilled drainage holes in the bottom and aeration holes in the sides along the top, and set 'em on some bricks (for aeration) under the deck. They're hardly noticeable (not even smellable, either) and it cost all of $10. As a result of composting, too, my garbage never smells -- I mostly only throw away the occasional sheet of plastic packaging. I feel pretty smug when I think about them composters.
Not only did I have to make them, I had to learn how to compost. Because having a composter and learning how to compost are actually two different things. There are rules to things going in the composter. Like, more "dries" than "wets," more "browns" than "greens," no dairy and no meat, only raw things. Oh, and ya gotta stir it up every day, for those little containers.
Now, do I stir it every day? No. Maybe like every week. I'm not a compost saint, unfortunately. But whatever. Basically, it goes like this: put wet stuff in the repurposed yogurt container 'till it's full, then take that out to the compost bucket. Stir it up when I get around to it. Dump dry leaves in there every once in awhile.
Oh, the dry leaves are what makes it great, though. I was thinking about how autumn is going to help me out with my dry leaf stash. You can evidently use straw, or even newspaper, for "dry" things, to keep the moisture level. (I've heard it's supposed to be "like a damp sponge.") But I just use dry leaves that I keep in some garbage bags in the garage. And man, those leaves smell really great. I'm not kidding. It's like potpurri. So I'm excited about having more dry leaves to keep in my garage.
Anyway, I was in there composting today, and I noticed something. The stupid Sun Chips bag STILL has not composted.
I think I put it in there before Shane left in July. If you've bought Sun Chips in the last year, you know what I mean. They did something to make their bags SUPER CRINKLY LOUD. BUT, they say, IT'S BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPOSTABLE!!
Apparently the statement only applies under very specific conditions. I want you to know that my composting repertoire is expansive... an entire spaghetti squash, pumpkin skin, cobs from corn, eggshells... so baby, it's you, not me. Darn you, Sun Chips. Darn you and your stupid loud bags that don't even compost under conditions you can recreate on planet Earth.
Well, anyway. That was corporate lie #1.
Corporate lie #2 isn't so much a lie as... the Money Mailer people trying to be misleading. I've entered another phase of trying to minimize my junk mail, and I've done pretty good. I called the number you can call to have credit card companies quit sending you stuff (1-888-567-8688, read about that here if you didn't know), and I even got those junk newspapers to quit arriving at my door (the solution was a 2'x3' sign taped to my garage door: DO NOT DELIVER NEWSPAPERS HERE).
Then I got the Money Mailer. Oh, man. It irks me because it's all just designed to entice you into spending money, not really saving you anything. I'm a freakishly conservative spender, so I hate the Money Mailer as a matter of that principle as well as the environmental front.
It says (in size 4 font on the very bottom) that you can go to their website to remove your address from the mailing list. Yay, says I! I'll go do that! So I go do it. And right on the site is this little plea from the poor, poor corporation that says: "Before submitting your information, please take a moment to review the impact of direct mail and myths and realities about advertising mail and the environment."
I think of myself as open-minded, so I decided to try to read what they had to say as objectively as I could. And it was really hard and I didn't actually read it with any objectivity 'till about the third time around. But I think I did it. I decided, just for fun, to see what exactly they were saying.
Here is one of their claims:
"Discarded direct mail represents just 2.4% of municipal solid waste, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the recycling recovery rate has grown nearly 700% since 1990."
1) The EPA reported in 2008 that Americans generated about 250 million tons of trash (municipal solid waste). 54% of that (135 million tons) actually went to the landfill; the rest of it was recycled and composted. I'm not sure as to whether they meant MSW that went to the landfill, or total MSW. But let's be generous and assume it was MSW that made it to the landfill (because we're nice people, really). 2.4% of 135 million is 3.24 million. (Did I do that math right?) So, 3 and a quarter million tons of trash is like, no big deal, apparently.
[If you're wondering -- using the other figure, it's 6 million tons.]
2) Any avid environmentalist will tell you that the saying is "Reduce, reuse, recycle," in that order, because the terms decrease in effectiveness in that order. The best thing you can do is reduce your waste. The second-best is to reuse. The third-best thing is recycling, and some people (me included) will gently remind you that recycling is really not doing as much as you believe it's doing.
Even though I was completely convinced by this fabulously clever information that I should definitely continue to receive the Money Mailers that I never even open, I decided to take myself off the list anyway.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Promises, promises.
So, that whole "hey I'll update this once a week" thing. Yeah. I know.
Whatever.
Anyway, the pumpkins are all dead. My bust. It's been an insane week. It was the last week of my job, plus I housesat/dogsat/catsat/normalsat for the entire week. It really made me rethink the whole "ever having a pet" thing. Don't get me wrong. I love dogs. Cats are okay, but dogs. Yes.
However, dogs require work. Cats require work (but less than dogs). Fish require work. And even stupid baby pumpkin seedlings require work. Time, energy, money. And right now, I'm just this insane woman. Energy I've got, but expendable income, not so much, and time, well, time's a funny thing. Time is one of my most precious and most squandered resources, by far.
It sort of depresses me that I can't do everything I want, but it's the truth. I have to make lists of everything I want to do and prioritize the top three. I eliminate about ten things every time I do this.
My basic realization, at this point, is that I was so busy that I couldn't even spare five minutes to come to my own house once or twice during the week to water my baby pumpkin seedlings. I really cared about them, but I failed to prioritize. Either that, or I did prioritize in a sort of crude fashion.
It's sometimes difficult to remember that caring for Earth belongs on the priority list, and is worthy of my time. Worthy of the extra minutes spent going to the farmer's market instead of the grocery store. Worthy of making the effort to learn a new recipe that includes local produce.
It's quite hard, though. Life bears down on you sometimes.
At this point, I'm rambling... smell ya later.
Whatever.
Anyway, the pumpkins are all dead. My bust. It's been an insane week. It was the last week of my job, plus I housesat/dogsat/catsat/normalsat for the entire week. It really made me rethink the whole "ever having a pet" thing. Don't get me wrong. I love dogs. Cats are okay, but dogs. Yes.
However, dogs require work. Cats require work (but less than dogs). Fish require work. And even stupid baby pumpkin seedlings require work. Time, energy, money. And right now, I'm just this insane woman. Energy I've got, but expendable income, not so much, and time, well, time's a funny thing. Time is one of my most precious and most squandered resources, by far.
It sort of depresses me that I can't do everything I want, but it's the truth. I have to make lists of everything I want to do and prioritize the top three. I eliminate about ten things every time I do this.
My basic realization, at this point, is that I was so busy that I couldn't even spare five minutes to come to my own house once or twice during the week to water my baby pumpkin seedlings. I really cared about them, but I failed to prioritize. Either that, or I did prioritize in a sort of crude fashion.
It's sometimes difficult to remember that caring for Earth belongs on the priority list, and is worthy of my time. Worthy of the extra minutes spent going to the farmer's market instead of the grocery store. Worthy of making the effort to learn a new recipe that includes local produce.
It's quite hard, though. Life bears down on you sometimes.
At this point, I'm rambling... smell ya later.
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