Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.
Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.
All of which are in the "little things mean a lot" category.
Quit buying bottled water. It's almost always packaged in plastic and varies hardly at all from tap water. Just get tap water. If water in your area really sucks, okay you can do something, but bottled water isn't it.
I'll note, I don't include carbonated water, which is its own drink, in this. But buy it in the glass bottles or the aluminum cans.
By the way, if you live in the US, you don't need to pack around water constantly. Americans carry more water on an individual daily basis than the British 8th Army used in the desert in all of World War Two. You are hydrated just fine.
If you must pack water around with you like a desert explorer on an extended expedition, get a good metal container. We used to call these "canteens", but now water bottles are called something else. Anyhow, get one of those.
Plant a garden.
Go hunting.
Go fishing.
Grow it, harvest it and process it yourself.
Switch to fountain pens, if you use pens. Disposable ballpoint pens have gotten to the point where they write really nicely, but they're an entire industry based on disposal. It's wasteful.
Don't buy it just because its new and you have an old one. I don't know what it would be, but the buy it as its new ethos is wasteful also.
Walk there if you can.
Ride a bike there if you can.
If you are an outdoorsman and use an ATV to get to the sticks, get rid of it. There are legitimate uses for them to be sure, and of all sorts, but hunting and fishing aren't two of them. If you need a mule, get a mule.
Skip the sanctimony. Almost all environmental sanctimony is handed out by people who have bought into theories of environmentalism that suffer in the face of reality, and tend to be, beyond that, virtue signaling. Some people living really simple quite lives are much more green than people who make a big deal of claiming to be green.
If your clothes are synthetic, switch, when they wear out, to ones that aren't. And buy durable ones. That means buying plain or classic ones. A good pair of Levi's lasts for eons, a Sheepskin coat is going to outlast a synthetic one by decades, a beaver felt broadbrimmed hat will last for 20 or more years when your high tech synthetic one has had to be replaced two or three times.
And your Levi's (and that's not the only thing) don't need to be washed nearly as often as you think they do, unless you work an occupation that makes them routinely dirty.
To add to that, quit buying the laundry soap that's perfumed. It's just some weird chemicals and it just makes stuff smell weird, not clean.
Same thing with "laundry sheets". You don't need them.
On perfumed stuff, I wish I could say the same thing about deodorant, a useless product that made its real appearance in the late 60s, but its now so ingrained in society there's no avoiding it. At least it means that we have to put up with perfume, and even more useless product, less than we used to have to.
Make it yourself, if you can, whatever it is, from dinner to durables.
Go to church on Sunday and, if you are open to it, go to one that's an Apostolic Church. An institution that has its eyes on the really long future and the really long past, and regards them all as pretty much the present, has a lot more going on for it than whatever organization you might be pondering joining.
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