C’mon on in – have a
cup of coffee. Thank you for your comments about the last Crunchy Granola blog
on recycling. A lot of people commented to me in person about this really big
issue (by the way, folks are welcome to join the conversation here at the
blog-site).
It seems there is a lot of garbage talk these days.The new documentary, Trashed by Candida Brady,
hosted by actor, Jeremy Irons had a recent showing on the film festival circuit
at the East Lansing Film Festival (ELFF). Trashed visually drives home the mess we are making with apparently
little attempt to clean up after ourselves. One fact of this awful reality is
that all of Toronto Canada trash is delivered across the Blue Water or
Ambassador Bridge to our beautiful Michigan! Isn’t there enough room in Canada?
Then along comes the Fresh Air radio interview on NationalPublic Radio with Adam Minter author of JunkyardPlanet in which Minter shows the seemingly ridiculous globalization of the
multi-billion dollar business of trash. In Junkyard
Planet we ship things like cardboard, steel, and Holiday lights to China
and they ship it back to us in the form of new cardboard boxes and rolls of
steel for steel things. Holiday lights go across the sea to China in what used to be
empty containers to be stripped in factories (or small villages) for copper and
fuel.
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| Sign of the times, recycle Holiday Lights, where does it go? |
Why don’t we just ship such things to industrial sites here
in the U.S, you say. Apparently, because it is much cheaper to send the waste
in container ships across the seas to be recycled. Strange world. Speaking of
container ships carrying all this crap – Rose George has researched by living
on a container ship and reported to us the world of container shipping in 90%of Everything. Ninety percent of our consumable desires are shipped to
us in containers from someplace else, much of it recycled and
reprocessed from our trash a few months before.
Take a sip of your coffee. Catch your breath, but please, let’s
keep talking. We cannot hide from this very important issue. I know. We are
already overwhelmed by so many things – wars, weapons, natural devastation,
health here, health there, successful vs failing schools, down to – do we have enough
money to pay for a new roof, finding child care, intimate family concerns of
life and death.
But listen, we have to keep trying. We have to make the
cycle of consumable-to-trash an issue in our neighborhoods, our legislatures, our marketing
decisions, our own personal paper-or-plastic-no-thank-you. It’s hard especially
when innocent high school students are stuffing one product each in a plastic
bag as they have been told and we are in the awkward moment of stopping them at
the grocery checkout. We can join organizations that work toward environmental
sanity, live thoughtfully about our use of products and their containers, we
can teach our children to live less trashy.
We have to try to do one thing a day, each of us
individually, that will deter the tragedy of too much trash. Reminds me of Idiocracy. Though I didn’t
like the movie at first, images of the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy
continue to haunt my thinking about society's complacency and our future life with garbage.
Our first Thanksgiving on the homestead is a luscious memory today. Described in A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life (Amazon Kindle, $2.99), we prepared a meal of most of our own home and locally produced food, cooked on River Grandma's superior wood cook stove. I am so grateful for this memory of a very soft footprint from a special time in our lives.
Thanks for stopping by.
love, Helene
