Apr

23

Happy Earth Day!

Posted by Commander Mommy

April 23, 2008 |

Happy Earth Day!

Okay, so maybe I’m a day late and dollar short, especially since yesterday was Earth Day but it’s only because I was working in the yard. Appropriate, yes?

The sad fact is that I didn’t even realize it was Earth Day until I found these articles on the Washington Post yesterday evening. The first, found here, lays out the mounting disappointment about the overall effectiveness of Earth Day. The second, found here, reads like an obituary for Earth Day. It actually left me snickering in an unhealthy way. You see, in the household of Commander Mommy, going green has been slow going.

I am a pragmatic person. I know the impact a single household can make on a community. Namely, none. Our family, by ourselves, can do nothing to improve the pollution in the Cincinnati area. We cannot stop ozone depletion. We cannot empty, nor save, significant amounts of water from the reserves. Our electricity is what it is, nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Then Little Man started kindergarten. The papers that were sent home daily astounded me. Seeing them pile up because he couldn’t bear to throw them away was a real eye-opener. I began to feel guilt throwing all those trees away. I began to fear the ghosts of dead trees, as a good friend once put it. I resisted recycling because it seemed like so much trouble and I was a busy woman. Besides, our community makes you pay extra for recycle services. Too much trouble.

Then Trooper began preschool and Little Man advanced to first grade. The papers kept coming. I would go to my friends’ houses and they would have two different trash cans sitting out in their kitchens. I would blush as they corrected me on what to throw away and where. Friends would visit and ask me where my recycle bins were so they could throw away their pop cans. I would again blush and say I didn’t have one. I would make excuses about paying extra. They would educate me about local dumpsters that were free. I would shrug it off and they would frown.

Slowly (because I am stubborn and that isn’t always a great trait), it began to dawn on me: I can’t make a difference but, “Together, we can.” (Oh dear, now I sound like an Obama campaign. Somebody stop me!) The day I decided to recycle, I became Little Man’s hero. He became so excited that he immediately emptied all those dreaded precious school papers of his into the recycle bin. He hasn’t stopped yet.

This recycling thing isn’t always fun. I really despise taking all the labels off of my soup cans and rinsing them before getting them off my kitchen counter. It was much easier to just throw them away, let me tell you! Composting in the winter isn’t glamorous, either. When it is all said and done, though, it isn’t that much trouble. I no longer feel hopeless about the environment. I try and conserve gas not only because it is $3.59 per gallon (that is a rant for another day) but also because this one household is genuinely trying to reduce our carbon footprint. Do we always succeed? Definitely not. This is a new way of thinking, of living, and habits take time to form. But we are getting there.

I guess what I am trying to say is perhaps the idea behind Earth Day has become completely commercial and irritating, perhaps ‘green’ is no more than a political buzz word in the larger scheme of things, and maybe it is ‘dead’ as the author says BUT if I can be converted (which was nothing short of a miracle) then there is still hope. Don’t underestimate the power of the next generation and the influence all this propaganda has on their little minds. If Little Man and Trooper and their complete willingness to do anything that is better for the environment is any indication, history might just call them The Green Generation.


Comments

6 Comments so far

  1. battlestar on April 23, 2008 8:37 pm

    Don’t feel too bad. My household doesn’t recycle either (yet), and I have a degree in biology with plenty of classes in ecology and countless lectures about global warming and the like.

    But kudos to you for doing your part.

  2. Linterambiel on April 25, 2008 4:44 pm

    We don’t recycle at our house either, if it makes you feel any better. And if we lived in the country, we’d probably burn our trash to save money.

  3. Christopher Waldrop on April 28, 2008 2:48 pm

    I live in an area that has limited curbside recycling, so I feel like I’m doing my part–sort of. And the nice thing is many of my neighbors also seem to be recycling, although mine always seems to be the only can on the block that’s overflowing. (They only pick up the recyclables once a month.) And, since they don’t take glass, there’s a place down the street where I can drop off glass. Yes, I have to drive there, but I usually do it on my way somewhere else, so I’m being efficient as well as environmentally conscious.

  4. Heidi Peacock on April 28, 2008 6:34 pm

    Hurrah to you! It may be hard to get started but soon it will be second nature and best of all it will be a way of life that your kids will take with them into their future households. Just think of the amount of mindsets you are impacting through them and their future familes.

  5. Carolyn on April 29, 2008 2:17 pm

    I applaud your efforts! Now, remember, Earth Day is also a day reserved for some very special birthdays… Two of my favorite people ever were born on Earth Day.

  6. chopperpops on April 29, 2008 3:24 pm

    Earth Day makes me green. Not green as in bio-friendly, but green as in a boat on rough water. Green as in barf-friendly.
    We who were always careful to leave a good earth to our children are now accused, lectured & admonished by presumably well intentioned people to grab hold of a new environmentalist fervor. When I was a kid, we were ducking and covering in school while the Cubans imported Soviet ICBMs. The threat was real; bad guys were perpetrating potential destruction on humanity, and it would start at our homes. Today, it is the progress of nations that has become the enemy and I just don’t buy it.
    We wash cans of trash while we are encouraged to save water, seek to use hydrogen fuels knowing that inordinate amounts of carbon based fuels are needed to produce the hydrogen (which in turn burns much less efficiently than gasoline), and tremble over our output of carbon monoxide. CO2… didn’t we learn in grade school that it was plant food? And on top of it all, we establish a grotesque plan to grow food for fuel - corn of all things, in a corn based agri-economy - and have put families around the world at risk of starvation.
    This is by far my favorite blog on the internet, but I liked your heroism better before it was recycled.
    My criticism is not against you or your authorship; nor is it against ordinary Americans that have weighed the issue and have gone green (in the current sense) as a matter of conscience. Perhaps I am wrong; too old, or uninformed (but I’m still barf-friendly about Earth Day).
    Keep writing & I’ll keep reading!

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