Seven generations
As someone who thinks about environmental advocacy all day, every day, I often struggle to understand how others are not doing the same. There are some elements that are unique to those of us who are obsessed with finding a way to make every decision better, but there are some elements I feel should be easy to conceptualize.
The biggest one of these is the waste that we so easily put into our bins to be removed.
Visualizing the trash that each individual or family throws out each week, picturing what that adds up to over the course of a year, and then multiplying that by the years each person is alive, results in an amount we cannot conceive of. Adding in the waste we generate from moving, renovating, and accumulating, and multiplying that by the billions of people on this earth, it’s not hard to imagine that eventually, even with landfill mass breaking down, we will run out of room.
Native American philosophy speaks of the Seventh Generation Principle, which means to live in harmony with the laws of nature because the choices and decisions we make today will affect the lives of our descendents for seven generations.
If we really take the time to think about that for a moment, it can be like a punch in the gut to think about our relatives in the future and how many of the items we throw into the trash (and therefore into the landfill) after a few days, hours, minutes, even seconds of use, will affect their lives, because the reality is, they will. Plastic can take hundreds of years to decompose, and when it does, it releases toxins into the atmosphere.
Multiply that by all the items we discard, and all the people doing it. That is not enjoyable to think about. In fact, it can suck the air out of your lungs, make you want to reach for that x in the corner of your screen, No way, this is too much to think about!
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BUT, before you disappear off into a state of despair, this is where the motivation to act, to make a change, comes in. This is where you can do something with that pain you feel in your heart, and I promise you, in doing something about it through organizing and mobilizing with your community (be it locally or online), you will feel a lightness and an ease that you will want to seek again and again. It’s much better than the alternative of stuffing your feelings down, and it’s how systemic change comes about.
An ocean is made up of billions of droplets, droplets that on their own are almost impossible to notice, but that together create something with enormous power. If you think about your local community as a puddle, not as an ocean, but as a puddle that has the potential to make someone approaching it stop and change their course, that can combine with other puddles to create a flood (analogies upon analogies in this paragraph!), you’ll realize that your actions really can alter our climate in big ways.
Organizing and mobilizing your local community is THE most important thing you can do to not only address the guilt and shame in your heart (which, by the way, is mostly caused by things that are not your fault), but to take action into changing course. It doesn’t have to be anything big. In fact, it shouldn’t be something big to start with; I know you have a life outside this.
Supporting a local compost pickup business in your area and getting a few of your neighbors to sign up is a great place to start. Food waste is a huge contributor to emissions from landfills (and to global emissions as a whole).
At the next birthday party your child is invited to, ask if you can donate to a cause the child cares about, instead of purchasing a gift for them. When parents talk about how much “stuff” their kids have (which happens often), talk to them about this idea and how good it feels to donate instead.
When your city hosts an e-waste pickup for electronics, reach out to your elderly neighbors to see if they have anything you can take for them.
These actions aren’t big, but they plant seeds. They help ease burdens and stressors on those in your community, which can lead to them wanting to find ways to seek that feeling (and guess who they will go to for ideas!).
What matters is that we start somewhere.
