 |
| The Wombles were seen over-ground recently, wombling freely in Leicester Square Gardens to help launch the national anti-litter and fly-tipping campaign "Stop the Drop" |
I have become a bit of a bandit environmentalist. No, you won’t find me cleaning up field, factory and forest like some sort of American Womble, but I have been known to stick plastic bottles I find in parking lots on people's cars. I mail back empty, postage-paid envelopes to credit card companies in order to waste the time and money of big banks. And I break socially accepted comfort levels by doing things like admitting, without apology, that the winter jacket of mine that someone just admired was purchased at the local thrift store. I’m not really proud of this behavior. I know it’s unfairly provocative and, what’s more, it’s not like I don’t buy new clothing, use a credit card or purchase beverages in plastic bottlesI . But some days I get so discouraged and freaked out that I can’t help myself.
I think it all started the first time I tried to follow Colin Beavan’s No Impact Week, a week-long program designed to use daily awareness and practices to decrease or eliminate chemical and oil-based consumption thus decreasing my “carbon footprint.” So that includes gaining awareness and reducing consumption of plastics, energy, gasoline, cleaning products, food, clothing, toothpaste, candy, toilet paper and on and on and on. Then again, maybe it started before that. Maybe it started during those long walks on the plastic-littered beaches. Or maybe, when I first learned about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a mass of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas.In case you haven’t heard, because of the circular flow of currents in this particular part of the Pacific, discarded plastics collect and stay there floating around like some enormous plastic stew. Some if it breaks down to pieces tiny enough to be eaten by marine life. Those little fishes that don’t die from this diet are eaten by other fish, that are eaten by other fish, that are eaten by humans. So, when I look at a plastic bottle or a plastic grocery bag these days, I can’t help but think that someday I may be eating it. And the thought of eating dead, decayed dinosaur food, which is what the oil in those plastics really is, sort of turns my stomach.
Once my mind starts going off in these sorts of directions I start feeling really trapped. Admittedly, it is obsessive thinking, and maybe I should, as they say to the kids in martial arts, “turn around, sit down and meditate.” But when I do that it becomes clear to me that, all alone, I can change very little. That’s when I attempt to force my consciousness on other people with a sort of naïve notion that maybe together, as a human system, we can change things. And sometimes, after that, I get to feeling all optimistic and start humming Lennon’s “Imagine,” while faithfully reducing, reusing and recycling. And that works. For a day or two.
The truth that I can’t seem to avoid, that haunts even my meditative efforts, is that this is one serious mess we’re in. And there are huge, profit-making industries that are happy enough to pay lip service to the 3Rs mentioned above while steadfastly circumventing efforts as benign as ending the use of plastic bags. An even more mind-blowing fact is that we Americans are consuming the Earth’s resources so voraciously that if everyone on the planet were to assume our lifestyle we would need five Earths to meet that demand. Five Earths? Five? So that means that any movement toward social justice being worked on by well-meaning humanitarians cannot be underpinned by the notion that ending hunger and relieving poverty involves encouraging and helping suffering communities to move closer to our way of life.
A basic precept of the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, is that those of us living in a paradigm entirely reliant on consumerism and an endless growth economy are functioning under mistaken assumptions. I find myself feeling really grateful for that powerful statement because (when I remember it) it allows me to bypass any instincts toward judgment, blame or remorse and encourages me, instead, to expend my energy on attempting to reveal what those mistaken assumptions might be.
In a TED talk titled “Addicted to Risk,” Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine,” states, “As a culture, we have become far to willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable.” When thinking about global warming, she says, we tend to assess risk through an economic spyglass, and we come up with some pretty crazy ideas in order to delay any action that might threaten our economy. Among those, are questions we ask ourselves, like, “What is the latest possible moment we can wait?" Or, "How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive?” Klein addresses a lot of difficult truths in her talk, but it is this statement of hers that I find the most compelling: “[we have an] assumption that we can safely control the Earth’s awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making it not too hot, not to cold, but just right, sort of Goldilocks style.”
The remark is so awesomely ironic that it made me laugh. But I stopped laughing when the scientific community announced the discovery of a “possibly earthlike planet affectionately nicknamed Goldilocks,” because that busy, often overly-creative mind of mine started to wonder if we were being fed subliminal messages that if we trash this planet we can always move on to the next. But really what matters is not whether or not there is subliminal messaging of that sort going on. What matters is, how do we really feel about trashing this planet? And what measures are we willing to take to protect it?
This evening, my husband and I are going with some new friends to hear Bill McKibben speak in nearby Essex, NH. McKibben, author of Eaarth, founder of 350.org and active with Tar Sands Action, has become a powerful leader in the environmental movement. I’ve come to think of attending events like this as large, group meditation. I even entertain fantasies that after McKibben talks we’ll all put our hands together, throw them in the air like a cross-country team before the big meet, and shout out “Yop!” These days, Tar Sands Action is heading up efforts "to blow the whistle" on oil-backed politicians. I’m considering joining them in more local efforts. There's a picture of them below, all dressed up like referees in Washington, DC. Yikes! Maybe I am becoming a Womble afterall.
 |
| On Tuesday, January 24, Tar Sands Action "assembled the largest crowd of referees Capitol Hill has ever seen to blow the whistle on the routine corruption that passes as business as usual in Congress" |
Links of Interest
The Wombling Song
Naomi Klein's "Addicted to Risk"
No Impact Man
Oh, and you can connect with 350.org and Tar Sands Action on Facebook
I hadn't seen the Naomi Klein TED talk before. Thanks for referencing it, she is amazing .... and the Womblings were great too :)
ReplyDeleteThe Wombles doesn't have the same appeal as Dr. Seuss here though! Brits are the best audience for them, though I may be too honest and angst-ridden for that crowd. Alas. :)
Delete