People are complicated.
Your Point of View:
You’ve come to a realization.
You’ve made an eco-friendly switch in your home and you love your new
product and wish everyone could try it!
You’ve given up eating meat and you feel great and you wish that
everyone would join you in your love of the environment and animals. You found an amazing item at the thrift store
and you feel proud that you’re helping the earth and saving money, you wonder
why anyone shops new anymore when there is already so much stuff in the
world. You’ve planted a giant garden
this year and you got twelve huge butternut squash with little to no effort. You’ve gotten yourself an electric car and
you love the drive and wish everyone were driving them.
Everyone else: Well,
I recycle…. What a jerk.
How do we get along with such differing viewpoints? I can tell you that I’ve felt like an
outsider in most conversations my whole adult life. There are not many decisions that I make in
life without taking the environment into consideration, I am just that
person. I don’t mind being different,
but it’s hard to feel like somewhere along the way you woke up and look around
to realize that everyone else is still sleeping. You used to be sleeping too. The other thing is that you get super excited
as an environmentalist when you find something that helps you sleep at night –
As in, something that aligns with your goals of minimizing human’s harm to the
planet. Cloth diapers are SO
adorable. Electric vehicles are amazing
to drive. Cloth pads are simple,
comfortable and work well. Tapping your
maple trees to make your own syrup is a fun family activity. Etc. etc. etc. We do get excited, but how do we talk about
going above and beyond the norm while not making others feel bad about their
own efforts?
Even more than this though. Environmentalists have become
some of the most jerky people on the internet, and it’s not helping anything
and it’s giving us a bad name. Have you
heard the joke: How can you tell there’s
a vegan at your party? Don’t worry,
they’ll tell you!
A fast food company wants to advertise that they’ve made the switch
over to beef without the use of hormones and are reducing the waste they
produce. Companies are NOT people, but
they have made these decisions because it’s a way they can differentiate
themselves from their competitors and they believe there is a market of people
that are irked when they get a plastic straw in their drink that they didn’t
ask for. All too often though people
break out their soapbox and chastise these attempts as not enough…They
shouldn’t sell beef at all, they’re still cutting down trees for their
napkins…*Eye Roll*
It’s okay to get excited about your latest green item, but
let’s try to not let hippie turn to jerk.
Baby steps are good steps, any company that is trying is better than the
other 99%, banning straws won’t do much, and a beach cleanup won’t stay clean
for long, electric car batteries do still take resources from the earth, and
shipping glass over distances might take more fuel than plastic, but in this
world if you take one step toward caring for the earth in any way that you can
manage, you’re alright in my books.
No comments:
Post a Comment