So many things about our modern life are an affront to the Goddess and Her creation, our earth home, that it can be impossible to know where to start. But the issue that keeps sending me into a swoon is the ever-increasing volume of plastic waste. I've written about this a few times...I'm not sure if what I say will add anything new, but here goes.
Last night as I was making supper, I fixated for a few minutes on the little red plastic top to a small glass bottle of hot sauce. Many times recently in grocery stores or pharmacies, I have started to feel faint or woozy looking at aisle after aisle of plastic, but this was the first time a tiny piece of the stuff made me feel sick outside a store. Because it isn't just the large plastic items that are dangerous to our human health and that of the earth, it is all the tiny ones...the bottle caps, the little pull-tabs on the top of olive oils and such, the transparent plastic covers under the main cover of tubs of butter. The pens, pen tops, tooth brushes, tooth paste tube tops, dental floss containers, tape dispensers...hundreds upon hundreds of common food, toiletry, and household items and itty-bitty bits of packaging that cannot be recycled. (This doesn't even address the issue of how much of the plastic that we conscientiously place in recycling bins is actually being recycled.)
While I am a relatively low consumer of plastic overall, I'm sure most days I must throw out between ten and twenty of these small items, the kinds of things that we'd all like to think are too small to matter. (I accept my responsibility for this, even though I don't know how I can pare back a whole lot further on any aspect of my life and still be on this planet.) But think about it...there are 8 billion people on earth. Even if the whole world were as non-consumerist as I am, this would mean somewhere between 80 and 160 billion pieces of plastic are being disposed of daily. Daily! And I assume that worldwide, many people have occasion to throw out more like fifty or one hundred pieces of plastic. The owners and directors of companies that produce and promote the widespread use of these items have a whole different level of responsibility for this mess. It would easily be doable to search for more precise statistics, but for today, it's enough for me just to say, we have clogged Mother Earth's arteries with this noxious material and in a bizarre parallel we are now clogging our own arteries as well, as plastic makes its inevitable way into everything we consume.
I continue to feel strongly that Nature is ultimately stronger than plastic. However, on the other side of the major reboot that must be coming, I doubt that humans will ever again consider using the material. We may finally understand, after the fact, how dangerous and foolhardy it was, that all these "conveniences" simply weren't worth it.
