How can we keep doing it?

The evidence against the use of plastics for ANYTHING disposable is now overwhelming. Plastics are made from oil. Oil is a resource millions of years in the making and that has been largely used up in just 100 years. Once oil is out of the ground, no matter what you do with it, it is a problem. This can manifest as an oil spill – and the Gulf of Mexico is just the “Ben Hur” of something that goes on every day. It can be when we burn the oil and create air pollutants and greenhouse gas. It can be when we make petrochemical fertilizers and basically “mine” our farmland, leaving it dead and depleted after a few years. It can be in polymers and plastics, which are used for a very short time and then break into tiny particles that, asbestos like, dissipate throughout the environment causing damage in ways we will never know – that prize understanding will be for some distant future generations, who will also have the task of cleaning up or trying to live with our mess.

So how, knowing this, can we keep doing it? How come we are so perverse, so “easy going” in our treatment of the only place in the universe where we can have a life? What stops us using just a little bit of our personal energy and doing whatever it takes to NEVER buy throw away plastics? Because that is what it takes. That is what we need to do, much more than just “get through the day.” More than pay the mortgage, more than cope with another emergency. We need to understand very clearly the difference between what is urgent and what is important. It is important to stop using plastic throw away bottles. Really simple. It is important to take that understanding and slowly expand it to apply to other forms of plastic, and then other unnecessary but “easy” uses of oil. It is important to see, we are just the dust of this earth, made into humans for a little while, and then all our molecules will rejoin the dust again.

This is our earth. We are it, and we are killing it. It is important to stop this self abuse.

Tap Water – get something real into you.

On Passion, the Heart and Water

Over the weekend I was at a 5Rhythms dance class and the teacher left us with the question: "What are you passionate about?" I was thinking about it this morning. Am  I passionate about water filters? Water bottles? No, not really. I would prefer a world where there were neither; where there was an environment so pristine and water so available that we could simply dip a hand into a lake or a stream to take a drink.

I know that is not here, and that it is never going to happen. So I watch my passion shift a little bit, as it aligns with reality. Not a huge shift. Not even a stretch of the imagination. Simply a world where there is no such thing as disposable plastic. No bags and bottles in great islands in the ocean. No beaches covered in old thongs and screw caps. No storm water drains filled with garbage bags, styrofoam cups and fragments of clear, shiny PET. Not a huge stretch of the imagination, but a shift from our reality. And the sadness of those images mixed with the silliness of its cause -  (convenience mostly; a way of "saving" a few seconds; or a way, teen-like, to unleash some pent up power by not just giving a shit) - that mixture becomes volatile in my belly and ignites the sense of fire, and justice, and fairness, and caring for others that I CAN call passion. It brings the warmth of a broken heart into focus, the way that watching a beloved in pain does.

This earth is my mother, and my beloved. She is all abundant, all suffering, never complaining. But she is like a mother with wayward children who hit her, abuse her, steal from her, knock her down and piss on her. Stopping the use of plastic bottles does not seem like much, in the face of this, but it is a move in the right direction. There is an energy behind it that can carry more than its own weight. It makes a real difference, it makes an idealistic difference. But mostly, it makes a difference in my heart - in my way of being with my world.



This, I realize, is what I am passionate about: my heart's place in relation to my world. So why use plastic bottles to carry this passion? Convenience really - there is simply no more ridiculously easy target, no more invasive, below-the-radar, yet obvious symbol for how to cock up the planet, and through that to lose my connection with my heart and my passion. Not the life I want, just for the "ease" of a throw away bottle.

Great Australian Tap Water - get the real thing.

Dipak Ramsey

photo from 'La Diva de la Telephono Blanco'

there is only one water bottle