A few weeks ago, in the spike of pre-Christmas shopping season I saw a transport truck accident at the side of the highway. The trailer was on its side and spewing from the back doors was a mountain of over-packaged, candy-coloured plastic dollar-store junk. There was something about it that made me shudder – for real, shudder. In the scheme of things, it’s not a huge deal – it won’t make any kind of headlines in the news or attract much concern from any safety or environmental groups. But it got me thinking. And blogging apparently.
Over the last ten years I have moved several times. And in the past two years I have spent a lot of time sorting through boxes of stuff trying to decide what to keep and what to toss as I slowly transfer the good stuff from my original home town, Bracebridge Ontario, to my new permanent (whatever that means) home on Denman Island in BC. It’s a long and expensive road for my stuff. And I’ve been kicking myself over a lot of it.
When I was a kid I used to love dollar stores. I would march in with my bi-weekly allowance and buy up as many awesome trinkets as I could afford. I loved little boxes and bows and craft objects, small toys, hair accessories… pretty much all of it. I thought is wise to stock up for rainy days, or just in case I couldn’t get the stuff for so cheap later. My mother begged me not to spend my money on these silly trinkets, but I ignored her. I was certain I would find a use for every little thing.
Now as I sort through boxes and boxes of stuff that I used once and forgot about, stuff that is too crappy for the second hand store, stuff that I spent my parents’ hard earned money on, (earned later by me as I complained my way through a counter full of dishes twice a week) I am so angry with myself for not listening, not caring, not seeing the big picture.
I didn’t think of the sweatshops, the greedy corporations, the enormous amount of waste and toxins produced to create and transport this stuff that was essentially more waste and toxins. I just wanted the toys.
That over-turned tractor trailer was a sad reminder of how disgusted I am with myself and my culture. It was a gleaming epitome of wastefulness. Forget the big expensive stuff – the cell phones and generations of digital devices, the tickle-me-Elmos and lava lamps and hair straightness. Those things make me fret, for sure, but the amount of one-time-use plastic crap, absolute 100% garbage that is shipped over land and sea to be unwrapped, used once and thrown out (or in my case, stored for ten years, panicked over and then thrown out) is… atrocious.
I would say that over the past two years, since moving to the island and living small, I have become what a lot of people would think of as extreme in my opinions about wastefulness. My good friend Krystal and I have had some lengthy ranting-duets about friends and acquaintances who see us as “oh no, you’re one of those…” total fun-killing freaks for caring – a lot – about our world. The fact that most of the population of North America (and there are a hell of a lot of people out there) thinks this way is really, really fucked up. That’s right, I’m not even going to sensor that.
If you’ve read any other blog entries, you know the way I live. It’s pretty much camping. My car is a bicycle. My hubster and I grow food and plant trees, and actually hug trees. We actually do. I admit, I feel like a weirdo doing it, and I’m going to go ahead and say that my husband usually starts the tree hugging on any given day and I join in with some reluctance, but ya. We do it. And still, the fact that I have flown in an airplane more than five times in my life and usually forget my travel mug at home but buy hot chocolate anyway, and that I bought a pleather jacket last year, means I refuse to call myself an environmentalist. I have already, in my 28 years of life, used enough of the world’s resources that I’m sure my footprint is irreversible. Which makes me think there are actually very, very few environmentalists in the world and most of them are so poor they are almost dead.
I was listening to a radio interview on the CBC a while ago with a few panel members talking about the oil sands. Please forgive me, I won’t remember all of the details accurately, but I’ll try to get a point of some kind across here. There was a Calgary audience, who seemed to be mostly in cahoots with the environmentalist on the panel, but also sympathetic to the oil-sands representative, not so much when she claimed that Canadian oil was ethical oil, but when she stated that, let’s face it, our economy and thus world depends on oil. Without oil we’d all be poor and miserable and probably also dead. Canadian oil is way better than oil from the middle-east, and we need oil, there’s no way around it, so suck it up, the oil sands are good.
Blllaaaarrrrrgggg!!!!! I did not like that lady! We don’t need all of this stuff we have. Period. We don’t need it to be healthy, we don’t need it to be happy and we don’t need it to live. I swear we don’t. I have been living without a lot of it, and I’m pretty damn sure we don’t need it.
We need friends and family. We need skills, people who can make things out of what the earth provides, on a small scale so the earth has time to recover after we take a tree or move some soil. We need community cooperation and support. We need crafters and gardeners and people who know how to make medicine from herbs without processing them in to coloured pills and capsules and mixing them with poisons. We need to barter. We need pride and celebration. We don’t need S.U.V.’s in the city. We don’t need trips to Disney Land. We don’t need cheap plastic junk.
I’m going to stop ranting, because I’m going on a lot of tangents for one blog entry, and probably making someone angry. Please though, continue the conversation through comments. I’m interested in your opinion about all this kind of stuff.
And check out some Canadian artists and crafts people online. There’s a lot of high-quality, beautiful stuff to buy – purchases that really help the ecomony and don’t devastate the environment.
I’m being bossy.
Yuck.
