Happy Earth Day!
As I was walking to work this morning, I made up a little song in my head (as I am wont to do) thanking the earth for existing, and also apologizing that for a lot of us, we spent years doing damaging things, not out of spite or avarice, but because we just didn't know.
I remember one of the first grades I was in (we moved four times during first grade!), we used to get a morning break, and they would give us little glass bottles of milk to drink. How I loved those little glass bottles! They had such a pretty design, and I always felt like someone in an old-timey movie where the milkman would deliver bottles of milk. As a kid who loved drinking milk, it was a treat, both aesthetically and physically.
That was in the first of the first grades where I went to school. At all of the ones after that, we first of all, didn't get a morning break, and secondly, when you got milk at lunchtime, it was always in those plastic-coated cartons. Which was also what we had at home, so it was no big deal.
Of course, at the time, the things we didn't know about (at least the average American didn't know) was the impact of a) using a glass bottle once and then tossing it, b) the problems with plastic (it was such a big thing - so convenient, it didn't break, it was lighter to carry!), and of course 3) the impact of farming (especially once factory farms got going) on the environment.
Anyway, then I moved on to other things that - at least in my case - I didn't do, because I just didn't know. I have always been someone who turns beet red in 10 minutes or less if I am outside in the direct sun and not completely covered up. I can remember as a kid, my mother would slather suntan lotion on me, thinking it would protect my skin. Because again, the average person had never heard of something like sunscreen, and especially as a kid, I didn't want to walk around all year in long pants and long sleeves. I did usually wear a hat, especially after a bad burn on my scalp one year. I spent a good deal of my life looking for shade to be honest (still do!)
There are so many other things that were innovative, convenient, and inexpensive that we used (i.e., styrofoam), or wore (i.e, polyester), or loved (i.e, driving EVERYWHERE, even if a block away), only to learn years later that they were sometimes bad for us, and almost always bad for the earth.
I used to feel really guilty about all of this. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was just doing the best I could with what I had to work with, financially, and informationally. Once we started to learn more about organic things, sustainability, etc., I tried hard to start "doing the right thing," even when it was hard to remember and/or afford to do. So although I regret that it all turned out this way, I no longer feel guilty, because there is a huge difference between willful ignorance and plain old ignorance, and the "bad" things I did were from plain old ignorance.
The things we didn't know, right?
Give thanks to your Mother Earth today, if nothing else for allowing you to still be here. And have a lovely weekend!
(Now I have to go as it is time to make up a little song in my head about how I can't wait for the workday to be over ... 😏 )
