When I was little, I was a Sesame Street junkie. I can remember watching it on wooden-encased cubes of TVs that were bigger than I was. Oscar the Grouch always mystified me: I envisioned apartments and circus caves and more under his traschcan. Of course there must be lots of room for all our garbage, if Oscar had such a wondrous subterranean world. Couldn't we just hide it all?
I have to wonder if this wasn't an attempt by my parents' generation to try to soothe us youngsters: environmentalism was born when they were in high school and college so there had to be some inkling in the back of their minds that consuming and discarding can only work for a finite time before we are wading in rivers of garbage. Were they trying to keep us from worrying?
I remember trying to find ways to reuse items around me as a child. It was almost as if I knew, from an early age, that there is something wrong with just throwing things out, and I loved reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books- these were people who didn't have much and USED EVERYTHING. I remember being cognizent of the fact that her family didn't overconsume and that they weren't leaving a lasting trace on the earth around them. I've seen my own children struggle with the idea of throwing things away. I wonder if their reluctance is actually their attempt at preservation, a hidden human consciousness that my children are still young enough to hear?
I've always had a high disposeability consciousness, I guess. For years I've stuffed it down, ignored the little voices in my head that say "You've got to change this. The human race needs to change, big time!"
So I'm going to try to change. I'll be checking in here every once in a while as I attempt to make our household "lo-garbage", a term I coined after I decided that I'm not ready to (would I be able to?) go "no-garbage".
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