Tread Gently On The Earth
Mother, you carried me
for nine long months.
Mother, you carried me
for nine long months
and gave birth in an hour.
Mother, you carried me
for nine long months
and bore me and raised me
to be kind and fair and generous.
Mother, you carried me
for nine long months
and bore me and raised me
to be kind and fair and generous
just like you. Just like you.
--Siberian folksong
We throw away, without recognising that it is our Mother earth who must attend to our refuse, just as our individual mothers picked up our toys in distant childhood.
During my lifetime I have seen the way we deal with rubbish (trash/garbage, call it what you will) change dramatically. When I was little, everything went in the trash. It didn't matter what it was made of, it got put in the trash and carted off by the men that worked the dustbin lorry - and incidentally, my granfather John Tanner used to be a refuse collector. Then some people... real hippies they were, (not) that I knew started making their own compost... it kind of caught on and almost everyone owned a compost bin. So... trash got sorted into things that would compost.. and stuff that still had to be thrown into the trash. That lasted for a long, long time...
Then came along this wonderful new idea - recycling. At first it was just bottles and cans, then slowly paper and cardboard... then plastic and now, all the trash gets sorted out and you'd think there wouldn't be any trash any more? Right? Things that make you go hmmmm.
So then I moved here - to Egypt - to work... my heart breaks, because here is what was everywhere else all those many years ago - no recycling, everything is trash. And the streets are literally overflowing with it. Even at school, everything was trash. Of course there are some of us that try to reduce that - we reuse the backs of pieces of paper we've had to print out for scrap paper, messages, kids to draw on etc... try to reuse boxes, and bottles... and joy of joys, our nursery is going to make a greenhouse out of plastic water bottles, and believe me, Egypt has a lot of those!
Mir and I have often talked about getting a compost bin... and maybe this summer would be a good time to do that if we get the chance. If we could do that, the actual trash in the house would be significantly lower. We'd compost the vegetable waste, be burning the rat litter, (and maybe adding those ashes to the compost, or keeping a separate ash pile), continuing to recyle as we do... then... what's left to trash - to go to the landifill? The thought is quite exciting really.
Just one small thing we can do for Mother Earth.