Thursday, April 22, 2010

Throw Away Society: As if there's not already enough angry blog posts on the internet


I saw three things this week that made me think I need to do a bit more to reduce my ecological footprint.

The fist was an advertisement in Parents magazine for a throw away hand towel. The ad had a picture of a grimy hand towel hanging on the towel rack in the bathroom, and next to it was a giant tissue box looking thing attached to the hand rack dispensing clean, virgin throw away hand towels for your home. Seriously, WTF, do we really need more disposable crap? That is just not cool. Its not cool that Kleenex developed that product, its not cool that Parents magazine agreed to run the add, and any Hummer driving douche that buys that product is definitely not cool.

The second was some crazy lady (i.e. the senior editor of Grist) going on about how "kids are killing the planet" (or whatever her exact words were). I completely disagree with the majority of what this lady has to say and think that she sounds kind of soulless and selfish. For example, she seems to care more about money (psst - lady, you can't take it with you, and you'll have no one to pass it on to) and losing spontaneous Saturday nights out on the town for a few years than about being surrounded by a loving family. She also seems to think that having kids somehow precludes her from having a career - what is this the 1950s? I know, I should be more accepting of the lifestyle choices she's made, but I just can't help but think this lady sounds like a bitch and is just using the whole "green" thing as a convenient excuse. There is however, one thing that I do agree with this crazy, dead inside lady about. Americans have a huge ecological footprint, and another kid means another person with that type of footprint. I believe, however, that there is hope for that, and things we can do to make that better. These things, however, do not include buying disposable hand towels from the Kleenex corporation.

The third thing that I saw this week that made me think I needed to come up with a few more ways to be more tree huggerish was at a mind numbingly boring conference I attended for my job. Trust me, you don't want me to get into the details. Suffice to say that a Native American Indian woman brought to my attention how much a process like making paper pollutes the environment (I know, that makes it sound like it was an interesting conference, trust me, it wasn't). It really made me think more about, not just the waste we produce, or the resources we use up, but the fact that the process to make all of this non-reusable crap is just terrible for our health the planet. Plus, this woman was passionate about helping to save the environment for her community, and that kind of passion is contagious.

So, here are my earth day resolutions.

  1. More sponge, less paper towel for cleaning.
  2. Reduce food packaging by buying in bulk.
  3. Remember to unplug those chargers when nothing is being charged (how oh how will I remember?!?!)
  4. Keep up with the cloth diapers, and the cloth wipes! :)

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