I’ve been trained by my culture to be mindless.
I’m retraining myself. Will you join me?…
STORE BAGS
About 10 or 12 years ago, I started bringing my own bags to the store. At first, I’d forget them in my trunk, wander the aisles, and remember to go back to my car to fetch them. I did this about 10 or 15 times until I started remembering to bring them before leaving the car. I wouldn’t let myself out of it; I wanted to create a new habit. And now I have a bike basket that fits at least two full bags (but I also live near a store and not in a trafficky city).
I’m actually shocked that stores still have paper and plastic bags at all. We are all inundated by bags; we don’t need stores to keep supplying us with them just because we’re lazy. It takes very little brain power to decide to think. Even if we were to run out, we’re all handy folk; we can each make a few bags out of something. If there’s anything we humans have never lacked, it’s resourcefulness.
PRODUCE BAGS
More recently, and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long, I’ve stopped using produce bags from the store. I have plenty already, so I rinse them out if they need it and let them dry in the laundry room until the next time I go to the store.
CELEBRATIONS, BARBECUES, POTLUCKS, AND CHURCH REFRESHMENTS
We humans (at least we Americans) have allowed ourselves to be happy, dare I say elitist wasters. We buy colorful, beautifully-printed, sometimes gallery-quality paper plates and napkins. We spend money on fancy table settings that are for one-time use. We create absolute mounds of garbage after celebrating together. Don’t even get me started on birthday balloons.
Many years ago, I started bringing a little picnic basket with 4 reusable plates, cups, and bowls, and plenty of plastic utensils to get-togethers involving food. I wash everything and put it all back in the basket and keep it in my car so I’m ready for the next event.
I’ll never forget going to a summer barbecue at church about 12 or 13 years ago. We were in California and there were about 1,500 people at our church. Not everyone came to the barbecue that day, but there were a lot of us. Two hours and a lot of merry-making later, there were overflowing garbage bags. The bible says we are to be stewards of the earth. I felt sickened by it. After washing my reusables and putting them back in my picnic basket, I called one of our pastors (who had recently announced some events put on by a Christian conservation organization). I asked him if he would set an example for all of the congregants by bringing his own reusables next time our church had a shindig. Sometimes all people need in order to change is to see someone they respect making that change. I’ll never forget his answer: “It’s too hard.” I can’t tell you not only how incorrect that is, but how mad I felt. And still feel. You can’t believe how easy it is. And you can’t believe how fast people can change when they want to and see someone they respect doing it. I lost a lot of respect for him that day.
I still have trouble getting my kids to forego a paper cup for water or a paper plate for crackers after church. It’s just too easy to use stuff than to care about it. (I’m not throwing them under the bus, just making a realistic statement.) I bought soft, foldable, plastic cups for each of them a few years ago. That way, they could put them in their back pockets on the way to church and use them for water or goodies. It worked for a while until cracks rendered the cups unusable. I use a glass cup in the church cupboard, then wash it before I leave.
We recently threw a birthday party for our younger son. We asked kids to bring their own bowl so we wouldn’t waste anything for the party’s sake, and we served foods that could be eaten with fingers for the most part. It worked out fine.
FOIL AND SARAN WRAP
I haven’t bought these for years. They aren’t recyclable (at least where I live), and I find that I get along just fine without them. I have plenty of large tupperwares for the fridge, and if I’m bringing something to a get-together, I just leave it uncovered – no big deal.
ZIPLOC BAGS FOR SCHOOL LUNCHES
I don’t ever buy ziploc bags. I use tupperwares for school lunches, and my kids wash them when they get home. It’s that simple.
CLOTHES
There are enough clothes in the world to cover every body probably a thousand times over. Why we need stores with new clothes – ever – eludes me. Except perhaps socks and underwear. But we’ve been trained that we need to look cute. I live on an island somewhat removed from keeping up with the Joneses (the Joneses keep summer homes here on the island that they rarely inhabit), and I wear whatever I want to wear. I never think about how someone will judge what I wear. But judgment seems to play a big role in others’ lives. Some people buy a new outfit for every event. Are we nuts? I’m ashamed of the fashion industry that keeps churning out “new fashions every season” just so they can use peers’ perceptions of what’s “out of style” to fuel our constant purchases. Patagonia is the only clothing company I know of that tries – so hard – to manufacture functional, long-lasting clothing whose imprint on the environment is as minimal as possible – no dyes flowing into rivers, no pesticide-y cotton, etc. You can even mail in your ratty, 10-year-old jacket with a broken zipper and they’ll fix it for free and mail it back to you. I’ve done it. The drawback of Patagonia clothing is that, when everything is done as conscientiously as possible, you realize how costly that is. A shirt is $80. A pair of pants is $100. Who can afford several items at that price? And they’re not even very good-looking, much less flattering. But shame on all those fashion companies who don’t care one iota about what they did to the world to fill their stores with “the latest trends” that will be thrown out by mindless shoppers a year later when they are told that they have to buy new fashions to “keep up.” The sad thing you realize about the affordable fashion companies – the ones that make $20 items – is that they are doing anything and everything to keep their items cheap. And oh, how I love inexpensive things. But, the environment and waste are of absolutely no consequence in the manufacture of their items, or else they would be forced to charge more.
I have bought used clothes most of my life. Sure, it’s fun to walk into air-conditioned stores with pop music playing and imagine myself in all the cute clothes hanging on their racks. But I’ve always felt guilt in retail stores. Immediately. My wallet doesn’t like them, and I always have buyer’s remorse when I get home. I don’t need more clothes than the ones already on me. It’s all a big game. Nothing that’s cheaply made really needs to cost $50 just because of the name sewn into it. And $50 is already too much to pay for a shirt or pants, in my mind. But I can walk into a used store and find really good-looking clothes, even hoity-toity brand names, for fantastic prices. I was elated when we first visited Orcas Island and there were three used clothing stores in tiny Eastsound. And just the other day, I got a pair of really nice jeans at our local Exchange that cost me just a few bucks. Love it!
ENTREPRENEURIAL ENDEAVORS
Today in America, you can pretty much do anything you dream up if you want to make it happen – start a fashion company, write a book, be a doctor, film a movie, anything. But how you go about it, well, waste is often the last thing ever considered in the process. Wasting is just so convenient. It’s easy, most people don’t care about it, and no one’s going to make you feel funny about doing it. So I applaud those entrepreneurs who set up lower waste and environmentally-conscious practices from the start. Yay to authors who print books on recycled materials. Good going to medical industries that develop or employ recyclable gloves, tubes, etc. And good for you, directors and producers who don’t have your celebrities and movie crews luxuriate in easy, convenient, wasteful craft services.
I am in the process of writing a book. It will be very tempting to want to print it on the nicest-looking, least expensive paper offered to me. But I will need to psyche myself up for the higher cost of recycled paper.
TECHNOLOGY
We seem completely oblivious to waste when it comes to wanting the ever-newest devices. We value technology these days almost above all, as if our lives must be lived hand-in-hand with it, no matter what the consequences, when actually, it’s quite the opposite – if no one is left out working the land and knowing how to do Earth-related tasks, we won’t have food. Farmers and agriculture people have suicide rates that are twice that of the general population. We need farmland and people who know what to do with it more than we need the newest iPhones.
I don’t have a cell phone, never have, and don’t suffer a bit. I feel quite free – no one needs to be able to find me at all times, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on all the music, videos, or communication that I’m deprived of. I’m not naive enough to think that people will stop wanting the newest technology, though I do think people have the ability to realize that 99% of it isn’t all that important unless their jobs depend on it.
I also work on a 12-year-old MacBook. It’s just starting to lose its ability to stay current, but overall it’s still fantastic. The only thing I can’t do on it is view Airbnb; the screen is just white when I type in the web address. My son claims that my computer is slow, but I notice it only is when others use it. It knows me. It doesn’t let me down.
Staying up on technology, if you’re not in a field that requires it, is simply satisfying a consumer craving. Like buying the latest clothing. Is it good for the environment? Or the people producing it? Or the people dismantling it when it’s dumped?
VACATIONS
It’s really easy to waste on vacation. It’s almost a legitimized elitism we bask in – I think we unconsciously feel we’ve earned the convenience to have nothing we have to think about on vacation. A month ago, I was in New Orleans for a sibling reunion. I had a really hard time watching the masses on Bourbon Street not care about the piles of nightly waste they were creating in order to have fun getting wasted. Nary a reused cup in that diverse crowd.
For years, I’ve felt bad about that cup of Coke or juice offered to me in an airplane. Sure, I can say no to it. But I haven’t. I don’t usually have a cup of any sort with me; just a water bottle. If I’m traveling all day – traveling from Orcas to anywhere is an all-day thing – a cup of orange juice along the way is such a nice little thing. Oftentimes, it’s the only thing the airline provides anymore without extra cost. I’ll often keep the cup from one flight and use it on the next, and keep it until the end of my travels for use on the plane trips back home. But that’s not enough. Consider that there are around 100,000 airline flights each day around the world. If there are, on average, about 100 people on each of those flights, and each person has a cup of juice, that’s 10,000,000 plastic cups used every day, just while people are in the sky.
MOVING OR DEATH
I don’t think people purge as often as I do. I feel burdened by extra, but a lot of people feel comforted by it. But when moving, a lot of people probably don’t take the time to recycle things they’re getting rid of. They have to move, and often they have to do it fairly quickly. Tack on that the heaviness people feel when a relative has died and they must offload every single thing that person owned. Loved ones don’t want that process to take a lifetime, especially with inconsequential things, so the recyclable items often go to the dump with everything else that isn’t valuable or meaningful.
If you can, take the time to help your loved ones offload during their lives. I’ve done it for my parents for the last 28 years. The first time I did it, summer was starting. I was in high school and had a lot of time off when I wasn’t working, so I looked around the house one day for something productive to do. It took me almost two whole months to go through every single thing my parents had collected over the years and decide whether it was important enough to keep. I’ve done major house purges for them every time they have moved, and now that my mom lives nearby, I purge her place every few months. She’s a saver, I’m not. So it beautifies her life and simplifies mine in the end. I’ll have to do it at some point, so why not all along the way?
Americans have become major collectors. Houses, closets, garages, drawers, kitchens, and storage units are full of stuff, and it keeps growing. We’ve told ourselves that one of the funnest things in life is buying, keeping, and buying more stuff. I think stuff is actually meaningful for people like my mom. She grew up right after the Depression, when hoarding was common. Then her parents moved 13 times while she was in school, so I think being able to have stuff, to her, subconsciously symbolizes stability.
WELL…
If I were an alien visiting the Earth, I would conclude that humans (Americans, at least) don’t care what they do as long as they’re satisfying some need for instant gratification. I’m included in that.
I often have this mental cartoon in my head of a North African nomad traveling with everything he owns on a camel’s back, accompanied by an American who’s stuck in the sand with all the things he’s collected – piles of cups to the moon, piles of TVs and toasters to the sky, and piles of plastic bags encircling him like a gigantic sirocco or haboob blocker. (Piles of things that are not only unnecessary but also severely limit him.)
One thing I think is almost certain is that this world will not continue as it is without all of us changing. A few millions won’t make a dent. I don’t see global change happening unless someone leads us in an excited, positive revolution without condemnation. Until then, perhaps the only real kick in the pants will have to come from a total famine, disaster, or financial plunge.
I’ve used the word “you” in this over and over, but there are lots of yous. Some of you are conscientious about plastics. Some of you grow food and ride your bike instead of driving a car. Some of you refrain from consumerism, instant gratification, and oil use, so you ban Amazon from your lives. It’s hard to take on every environmental ill in one’s life (Dan and Katie come the closest I’ve ever seen to doing so), and at this late point in the game, that will probably be our global downfall. There are still plenty of changes that I haven’t made. For instance, I’m a water waster. I don’t really look forward to taking a shower but once I’m in, I could stand there all day in the hot, hot water. I run cold, so standing in super hot water is blissful. And I can do it. Does it mean I should?
A sirocco is a wind storm; a haboob is a sand storm.
