As a Pagan Religious Scientist with Buddhist spiritual underpinnings, the regard we have for our planet and the “what comes around, goes around” truth of it all is making me crazy (and the planet deathly ill). I know that everything is interconnected, that all is one, but human treatment of earthly resources during my lifetime has me stamping my feet, exclaiming, “HEY, that’s not yours! Put that back!” The earth that I derive my spiritual connection from is being trampled. Oil, water, land, trees, minerals – taking more than what we need to collectively live healthy lives is not right or sustainable. The karmic wheel is about to run us over and that wheel is going to shove plastic particles up our noses.
Access TO other people’s resources has for decades included putting our waste in their space, using up their land, water and air, taking resources from them in a huge way. Our hyper-reliance on single-use plastics is killing us all slowly, but it’s killing many other people quickly. If California suffered what many in India, Indonesia, China and other parts of the very polluted world live with and die from, we, as pro-active, environment-loving change agents, would re-make systems so fast, it would make the world spin backwards. I strongly believe that Americans consume and toss the way we do because we don’t see the results of our choices.
If your car’s muffler were on the HOOD instead of at the back of the car, wouldn’t you think good and hard before making an optional trip? Our crap is spewing out to where we can’t see it, but millions of others are literally wading through it, breathing it in from nearby incinerator smokestacks, and drinking the results in their contaminated water. Out of sight, out of mind does not pertain to waste disposal. In a circular system, that comes back around sooner or later.
Every time we buy something, we need to know where it came from, the conditions it was grown in and how it was harvested or created, how it was packaged and shipped and how far, and what is going to happen to that packaging after we are done with it. How long will that product be used? What was the point of packaging something in plastic so that we could consume it in five minutes and then toss all the resultant waste?
Know that the plastics industry is not doing us any favors or creating items or packaging for our convenience; they have turned us into addicts with a waste product and now we are paying for it on every front – to purchase, to dispose, to clean up afterward. This is comparable to tipping our drug dealer.
All the products we think we need that are made of plastic existed before. The new green normal will be a radical time return to the roots of where and when we lived more simply, in healthy, earth-based fashion. Annie Leonard says “Don’t just be the change, make the change”
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