We are drowning in a plastics catastrophy. An article just last week alerted us to the frightening fact that we could be swallowing a credit card's weight in plastic each year. Yet we still shop at Trader Joe's. I spent part of our celebratory year end trip sifting through the mess of this all in my mind and I've decided - it's time to make changes within our family. It's time to trade penance in for prevention and to trade our reliance on single-use plastics in for - well - everything we used to use before; glass, wood, stainless steel... It's time to go back in history for the future. A directive, that for me, immediately conjures up the image of a Delorean upcycled into a time machine.
When I was Baanko's age it was the beginning of the 1980's. A decade that, as I remember it and as national geographic depicts it, was the threshold that we crossed into our excessive single-use habit of plastics. It was a decade that I spent nestled in nature while encapsulated by an unabashedly consumerist culture. I see those formative years now much like the pieces of artwork I created then. Entombed in laminate I have a few perfectly preserved pieces that prove I had the human essentials intact that I am currently striving to nourish and protect in my own children; creativity, wonder, self-direction, and true love for the natural world. My parents succeeded in keeping our biophilia intact, in part, by stranding us out on the edge of a nature preserve in a solar heated home. I may have been singing "Let's Go Crazy" in neon and jelly shoes on my ride home from school but once home I was exploring my yard, woods, and creek with wild abandon. While the 80's culturally condoned all things convenient and disposable and helped to create our current reliance on single-use plastic, the 80's also created me - someone who can really appreciate nature yet is ever bumping up against a plastic ceiling in my pursuits to truly love nature. Well, this past weekend just might have finally burst that bubble (wrap) once and for all.
After a quick stop at the kite shop on Sunday morning (Oregon's shores are so wonderfully windy), Baanko and I headed to a beach clean up at Otter Rock that was organized by Surfrider, Newport and SOLVE.
Upon arrival we were meet with stunning natural beauty, a slowly shrinking deposit of microplastics, and one incredible teacher - Scott Rosin. With sawed off barrels, homemade sifters, and truly meaningful metaphors, Scott was our ideal teacher. Part maker, storyteller, surfer, former smoke jumper, and devout earth steward on a mission, he's the gold standard when it comes to expeditionary learning. We had hit a jackpot. (Come to think of it, he even had a story about sifting for gold on the beach...)
Scott explained the quiet catastrophe of plastics with the help of his wild land firefighting experience. He pointed out that a wild fire is an immediate catastrophe that leaves no doubt about its potential to devastate if not immediately addressed. He helped us to understand that plastic pollution is as dire as a wildfire and yet few seem appropriately alarmed.
Scott also let us know that if every person on the planet cleaned up one ton of plastics from the ocean - we might have a chance. Since January of this year, every Sunday, with the help of volunteers, Scott has cleaned up close to two tons. "My ton is done. We're still working because out of all the people on the planet there are going to be some slackers..." His energy and attitude is admirably light for such a crushing issue.
"The days of a beach clean up consisting of styrofoam cups, plastic straws and bags are gone. This stuff has been tumbling around for decades now and has broken into tiny dangerous pieces," he prepares us. Our job for the morning was to scrape off the top layer of the beach and sift tiny pieces of plastic from the sand and driftwood.
We shared stories while we shoveled, poured, sifted, and bagged. All the while I was straining to grasp what exactly it was that I was feeling. By hearing Scott's stories I was able to borrow his smoke jumper's perspective and imagined us from above. We were a few strangers together for a few hours on a tiny patch of sand learning how to clean up this horrific mess we've made. I found what I was looking for: What I was feeling was profound humility.
As we signed off for the afternoon I shared this with Scott and he understood it immediately, "I think about all of these amazing things we've invented, yet, we aren't able to invent something to clean it all up..to get us out of this mess..." We both agreed that the very best thing that could happen would be for every person that uses plastic to have to commit to just an hour of cleaning it back up. Maybe then we would start to make a dent in the massive clean up project that we have ahead of us. Maybe then we would see individuals choosing for sustainability over current conveniences.
World Ocean's Day and our small clean-up commitment changed both me and my daughter for good. Since that morning Baanko has refused purchases in which she cannot chose a plastic alternative. I will never forget the look on her face when, on World Ocean's Day, a server at our "end of the school year celebration dinner" put a plastic cup, with plastic lid and a plastic straw down on her place mat.
"I won't spill, why did she automatically give that to me? Oh no! Do they give that to all the kids that eat here? Is it too late for her to take it back? I didn't touch it. And, hey, I didn't ask for that!"
She was deeply offended.
It wasn't lost on me in that moment that with a rebel yell she was crying less, less, less.
And I was in awe of her. At eight years old she was going to take on the server and if that didn't work, well then, the whole restaurant. She wasn't just trying on our family values. She was on a mission all her own now. I marveled at her courage.
If that conviction was the ONLY thing that she "accomplished" this school year (and it wasn't), for me, that was way more than enough. She had well earned summer vacation and more importantly a beach upon which she could enjoy it.
'
And to think it was a trip that almost didn't happen because of issues surrounding sustainability in my own life as a 2E-squared homeschool mom. Oh, the irony is deep like the ocean itself. I had spent the week leading up to our adventure dragging my feet and secretly hoping for an emergency that would make us cancel. When, of course, the emergency is the ocean and at all costs we can't "cancel" on our responsibility to help it. Yet, I was, and often am, exhausted.
When Baanko made it abundantly clear that this trip was something VERY important to her I dug deep. What I came up with was "Vacation" by the GoGos and a playlist of other flashback gems on an old "Summer Road Trip" CD. I remembered the sage old advice that I was given when I worked with women in recovery and I decided to lighten up while doing what was important and difficult work. I put in the CD and shoved off to the be-bop of "Girl's Just Wanna Have Fun."
And, we did.
The theme of World Ocean's Day this year was "Together We Can" highlighting the importance of addressing gender equality in our efforts to save and heal our oceans :
“We need to empower each and every citizen to take care of the ocean and enable all women to play transformative and ambitious roles in understanding, exploring, protecting and sustainably managing our ocean”, said Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, pointing out that this year’s “special edition” of World Oceans Day links the themes of gender equality and ocean preservation.https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1040091
Women engage in all aspects of ocean interaction, yet in many parts of the world, women’s contribution, both towards ocean-based livelihoods like fishing, and conservation efforts, are invisible and, gender inequality persists “from the marine industry to the field of ocean science”.
It was not lost on me that this was just "a girls trip". It was Baanko alone insisting that we honor World Ocean's Day by getting our feet wet and hands dirty. No one else took us up on our invitations to join in and she didn't care. She was of purpose and prioritizing her own learning by advocating for the experiences that she wants.
As I drove us back home through the mountains I thought about my own creative explorations in sustainability earlier in my life (a venture that had everything to do with the 1980's pop culture that we were rocking out to on the car stereo). What I pursued as a young adult was because my biophilia had been laminated for safe keeping in my childhood. I emerged from a decade famed for self-indulgence with a humility that only nature can bestow. Now, it is Baanko's turn. She's clearly already leading and I just have to find the inner resources to keep up. And, Together We Can.
