a peek inside the fishbowl

The September challenge of the BlogHersAct is about reducing packaging and the extra junk that ends up in the landfill. Yay! This is a topic that is close to my heart. 

The post has features a lot of great tips for reducing the amount of packaging in all of our lives.

We already do a lot of things to cut down on packaging materials, even the ones that can be recycled.

- we don’t plastic one-use water bottles. We use our Nalgenes, which are slowly being replaced by stainless steel containers.

- we almost always drink our coffee at home or bring it in a thermos.

- we almost always use cloth grocery bags or bins. I keep the bins in the trunk of the car, that way I’m less likely to forget them. (But it happens!)

- we pack litterless lunches. We use Tupperware-type containers for sandwiches (no zip locks) and small snacks.

- we reduce, reuse, and recycle what we can, and we compost compost compost

When we bought Sarah’s back-to-school backpack it was stuffed with a ton of balled up paper, you know, just to make it puffy for the display. I unstuffed it and left the paper there. Seriously, who needs it? I’ve done that with new shoes too. I just leave the box and stuffing behind.

There is more we could be doing. For example, I would love to increase the amount of recharagable batteries we own and use them more often.  But overall, I know we’re doing a lot of things to decrease our ecological footprint: we own one car (and it’s fuel-efficient), we like to eat organically (and locally when possible), Mark has been biking to work, we walk the kids to school, we live in a small house, we don’t use herbicides/pesticides on our property, we let the grass grow long to cut down on mowing frequency (a push mower is coming soon), we buy secondhand, we have a rainbarrel, we have cut down on the amount of cleaning chemicals we use in and around out home, and (perhaps most importantly) we have modest needs and don’t often cave in to the lure of Fancy New Product and Gadgetry.

I don’t feel hard done by. I don’t feel put out by these things. I don’t see it as a hardship or a sacrifice. I feel happy we do these things.

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Sue accused us of littering, in the comments of my August  30th Message in a bottle post.

To be honest, this did occur to me as we stood there on the Island Park Bridge with our plastic bottles in our hands. And perhaps it’s the optimist in me, but as they floated away I realized I really believed someone will find them and fish them out of the water. I don’t ordinarily throw garbage into our rivers. In fact, someone once encouraged Emma and Sarah to throw two pennies into a river (a different river)… like sort of a wishing well. This didn’t sit right with me, that’s how strongly I feel about polluting our rivers.

I don’t think Sue knows us very well, otherwise she wouldn’t have made that comment.

But it got me thinking: When should childhood fun be put aside for the environment? When should it not?

When we go camping I always buy the children some glowsticks. These are one-time-use-only, and are thrown in the garbage as soon as we’re finished with them.

When we have birthday parties we blow up balloons. These are one-time-use-only, and are thrown in the garbage as soon as we’re finished with them.

When we walk home from school sometimes we take a shortcut along a path that goes downhill through some trees. This is causing erosion.

In the summertime I make (and sometimes buy) bubble juice for blowing bubbles. Is this pollution? Think of the tons of the stuff that is made and sold every year. It has to end up somewhere. Should we stop buying it, to help save the environment?

Sometimes, when we’re at a restaurant, the girls use a disposable drinking straw, yet I don’t buy cheap markers from the dollar store because I know they’re just a piece of crap that’s going to end up in the garbage.

We’re living in an interesting age. I was just talking to a neighbor, we were laughing about how silly it is, about how guilty we feel when we forget to bring our cloth grocery bags to the store and sneak home carry all those plastic bags.

Where our family has drawn the line might be different from where other people (like Sue) has drawn the line.

This particular kind of awareness is relatively new to me. I didn’t feel the same way five years ago. Environmentalism has become our new religion. Many people’s views are shifting, just like ours have, but at a different pace. I still can’t believe how many shopping carts I see, overflowing with plastic bags. “Wow, that’s bad,” I think. But then again, someone might look at my children throwing plastic bottles into the river and think that we’re bad too.

It all depends on where you are, doesn’t it?