By Sue Crowley, executive director
Happy Earth Week Friends-here it is the third week of April, and it is a glorious time to pick up your banner for the one thing we all cannot live without – Earth. Our Earth is the gift that seems to keep on giving, except that we are s l o w l y realizing we need to be more judicious on our use of the precious gifts the planet continues to offer.
It has been my lifetime minus five years that we have been celebrating EARTH DAY-now Earth Week and advocating for our planet. Maybe we need to extend our celebration to Earth Month …. Earth Year ….. Earth Decade….and well, you get it. Yes, for sure, nature is pretty darn resilient, and if the human population were to drastically decline, I am quite certain the big blue marble and all its magnificent beings and parts and pieces would experience a big reprieve from our human population’s current impact. We saw this reprieve about four to five years ago when there was a good chunk of our population on pause from driving to work in our beloved automobiles. We and others experienced less noise pollution and less air pollution during this challenging period. This change is one example of altering our human behavior and habits and how we use the gifts of the earth to produce a positive effect.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, author and botanist, is a person who continues to share her observations and cultural traditions from which we all could benefit. Her latest book “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Economy in the Natural World” gives great insight in how thinking about something as a gift may help us to appreciate and preserve the preciousness of our home planet. How we interact with said gifts may change our approach to using them. Check it out-you won’t be disappointed.
So, all this save-the-earth stuff can be overwhelming and feel like the task of counting grains of sand on Neshotah Beach in Two Rivers. It feels like that not only because there are billions of grains but also the wind keeps blowing them around. We lose count and begin again. I encourage us all to begin again to do the good work of being gracious earth dwellers now and for future generations. I implore you to just pick one thing in your life and commit to being more earth friendly and share your passion for that commitment with your friends and family and strangers too. In this way, by setting the good example steadfastly, we kindly, gratefully, graciously encourage others to assume the same banner yet in their own way. I am hopeful that we will eventually coalesce to make decisions in favor of Earth.
What is my one thing that I am carrying the banner for now? Well, I recognize I am well off enough and privileged to dine out at various eating establishments. Often the meal is bigger than my stomach. When requesting a to-go container I try to bring my own if the to-go container offered is made of styrofoam. These styrofoam containers can easily be replaced with better options. I realize the cost is more for the non-styrofoam containers (short term cost). I know I would be very willing to pay for the more expensive biodegradable containers rather than have another single use stryofoam vessel end up in a landfill. In a recent conversation with colleagues, we were bantering about slogans and such, and the one that resonated with us is, “NATURE! IT’S WORTH IT!”
Image: EarthDay.org