Revisiting Some Ideas About Plastic Awareness

I helped a friend out this week editing a blog post for her.  She is in Laos, where the countryside is covered in plastic trash.  We are turning our planet into a garbage dump — from the garbage patches in our oceans:

to Mount Everest in the Himalayas — known as the world’s highest junkyard.

It’s a day of awareness in the school where I am substitute teaching. Tomorrow morning, at 8:30 am, the school will be shutting down just about everything for a few minutes, and then back on, just to get an idea, a sense, of how much power we are using. The school just got a meter that shows energy usage. There are a number of schools that have this technology installed. It is a great tool to visually see how much energy is being used — eGauge.

Plastic = Energy = Oil. The Alberta Tar Sands Project is destroying everything in sight to extract the oil from the land. “We’re up against the most profitable enterprise that humans have ever engaged in,” says Bill McKibben in this video:

What are the true costs of what we are doing, as human beings, to our planet?

I know, I know, I am starting to sound like a broken record.

The seven billionth human was born this past week. In the last century alone five billion people were added to the number of humans on this planet. How we are going to figure out the future of our planet is a huge undertaking. I showed this video to a handful of high school kids today (one of whom appreciated it), telling them this is their world, their inheritance:

I showed this video to a group of eleven and twelve year olds and they became excited and wanted to make some immediately:

Who has the time and energy to solve the world’s problems? Can we trust our corporate-sponsored government to do it for us?

I would rather put my money on somebody like Milo — who will be speaking at Boston University on November 9th along with Charles Moore at a ‘What You Can Do’ event about sustainability: ’11 Plastic Ocean.

It is a beautiful world. I am going to keep doing what I can to keep it that way… If you can help, that would be great.

Responsibility is not convenient — it’s necessary.

Rethink. Refuse. Reduce. Reuse.

Reimagine.

Thanks for reading!