Reusing packaging

Last night the air was cold, and something truly beautiful and magical began to happen… The dark sky opened up and small white falling crystals of water fell, descending gradually towards the ground dancing against the back drop of the evening sky. The grace each falling crystal displayed as it hung in the air on it’s way down, was enough to make a ballerina weep jealous tears. We stood for a moment in the doorway watching nature dance to the song of coming winter… The first snow falling around us, clinging in spots to the ground where it landed. A small frost that will crunch as we walk over it in the morning on the way to feed the goats. The first snow of the year was visible spread through the yard as the sun rose quietly this morning at the command of our very noisy rooster.

We live in an amazing and magical world. One full of green lushness, deep waters, snow dancing it’s way to the ground and colorful flowers reaching towards the sky. The leaves on our trees in autumn, become rich jewels of color in the autumn… Our forests, dark and deep, but within them, life everywhere. Everything magically knows how to behave and to use what is here… Everything understands it’s place in this vast art piece that is our beautiful world. Except human beings. 

We pride ourselves on our brilliance, judging other living things by what we choose to view as actions depicting intelligence. Never considering, perhaps we are not as smart as we think we are. Perhaps we are the most narcissistic rather than most brilliant animal walking this planet. We delude ourselves that no other species has achieved what we have, while Iceland, starts preparing for the collapse of Atlantic currents. The collapse, a product of the filth and pollution that comes from our economy which has forgotten itself. It seems to think it runs on money. In reality, money is merely the language our human economy speaks. It is in actuality entirely based in the second law of thermodynamics. It is all energy based. Everything runs on energy. So while we produce and create this economy quite different from that of all other living things on this planet, we destroy, and take on debt (which is what money is,) to the future. betting on energy being available in the future to fuel our economy. Bears don’t do this. Much as I have grown to hate them, I have also grown to respect them. Not because they are big and dangerous. But because of how they live on this planet. Their economy is different. They take what they need. Not more. They invest energy in the moment and feed on the product of that expense. All animals function similarly except humans.

Tragically the joke will be on us. As we utilize all our energy in our acts betting on a future while we gobble up not just our own natural nitch of resources, but every other living thing’s nitch in the process. We pollute the air all life depends on. Recently, I was watching something on tv after reading a book by Ben Fogle, about many things including our relationship with animals and conservation, The Accidental Naturalist. It was brilliant. Anyway, the tv bit I was watching was about plastic in the ocean. I grew up playing in the Atlantic, every summer down the Cape. I remember pristine stretches of rippled sand flats, the smell of the sea air and my favorite bird, the Sea Gull, screaming up above me. Watching what has infiltrated our oceans as a result of our economy and consumerism broke me. I cried. Once beautiful majestic waves are now full of micro plastic. The fish we eat, the fish every other animal eats, also full of plastic. Chemicals from those plastics and other packaging materials leaching out into the ocean, destroying and altering our marine life. No other animals do this to the other things that cohabit this planet with them. They seem to know better. Which begs the question, who is smarter? Us or them? 

Who has the superior economy? Us? Betting on a future we have already destroyed with the debts we owe against it that are voiced in literal dollar bills? Or them? They expend energy first, get what they need for a pay off, then do it all again next time they have need. No assumptions that the future will be as full of energy for use in the future to pay down debts with. Our ecologically unconcerned economy, seems to be oblivious that it is in fact like all animal economies based on and tied to our planet and it’s functions. We don’t realize how incredibly dangerous the territory we are entering is, as we celebrate the loan we just took from the bank or the stock market rising. We measure the economy by it’s language rather than it’s substance. Which allows us to forget so much of our own connection to the earth we live on and share with creatures proving to be far more intelligent than we are. 

We think only of the cost in the economic language we use. Which is why when prices rise, everyone has a hissy fit. Even as they over look the true threat to our economy. Energy, and over abuse of our planet resulting in a lack of needed energy in the future, to pay down our doubt. At which time, mother earth is gonna repossess everything. Iceland, is concerned about this now. So too should be many near where I live. But for some reason they seem oblivious as long as the stocks keep rising.

When the Atlantic current, which is already slowing, collapses, there will be another ice age. Mother nature will repossess. This is what concerns Iceland. More concerning for us where I am, is the massive rise in the ocean that will quite likely render many of our major cities on the north east coast, essentially unlivable. Here too, we should experience an ice age. But no one is thinking about that. Not here. Because unlike the bears, and unlike the people of Iceland, all we think about in this nation of uber economy discussed in dollars, is the stock market rising. Time is getting short. Nature is going to call in our debt. A debt that will impact and destroy many living things on this planet. Does creating this sound like the act of an intelligent species to you? Because to me it sounds like the act of the profoundly fucken stupid. This is the story our remains will tell to the generations suffering, depleted from our abuse of the earth and the energy that our economy is made up of. The story, will be written in the layers of strata containing our bones. It will lie at the bottom of our oceans empty and devoid of all life. 

So, what is the way forward? Honestly, there probably isn’t one at this point. Either way we are going down. But we can go down fighting back against the monster we have created or we can just keep on keeping on. It starts with each one of us. Thinking about the true economy over the dollars. It takes each one of us, tweaking our consumerist habits. Changing the way we utilize things, how we think about our waste. Is it waste? Or is it an opportunity? How can we create an opportunity from waste? We can reuse as much as we can. This was a jar that contained something I purchased. When it ran out, rather than giving it to the trash heap and eventually the ocean, I re-used it. I cleaned it out, and made some face moisturizer which I then scooped into product packaging that will now serve a new purpose. It will serve this new purpose again and again. I have also by doing this, forgone purchase of both a product and it’s packaging, by putting in the energy to produce it myself and re-using some trash I had lying around. Ironically this saved me money and spared me from taxation levied at all women called The Pink Tax. So, the cost of this high quality product then goes way down. It is exactly what I want rather than what is available on store shelves. The packaging was trash that was reused to spare the earth, and it is gender oriented tax free. It is a win all around for everyone but the billionaires producing the rubbish full of alcohol and nasty chemicals on the shelf at CVS. 

Nature too functions this way. Everything here on this planet has a cycle it goes through, reused in some capacity again and again. We must learn to honor this cycle and adopt it. Everything living depends on this. We must consider what we really need. We must preserve what we can and put in the energy to get immediate necessary needs met and leave some for the future. 

We need to reconsider the roll of packaging and the roll of plastic in our lives and econo0my. We need to smarten up before we destroy ourselves. While we are busy counting the shiny green dollars as the energy of the future that is in fact the true fuel of our economy is laid to waste. It is astonishing to me how much credit we give our own brilliance for forgetting what we once knew. The cynics of Greece knew it, as did the epicureans, even as recently as Thoreau, at Walden Pond, we understood these things. Somehow the steam engine was born and human smarts died in the fumes put out by the first exhaust pipe. 

Thoreau, is interesting to me… When he was a young man, he evidently burned down much of the forest surrounding Walden Pond. It was an accident. But from that accident, was birthed this desire to go out into the forest and to try to live deliberately. Living deliberately is hard to do when the meat of the economy is hidden under money sauce. Which on some level is part of why I choose to live on a homestead. It has an alarming way of bringing into focus these issues of what actually lurks within our economic structure and “wins.” That we think they are wins is a testament to our stupidity and ignorance as a species. Not to our brilliance, because we use tools like money, unlike most animals. 

So, look around your life. Ask yourself, how much of a patsy you are comfortable being, while the super wealthy get rich off the future economy of your children. Ask how much loss you are open to being instrumental in creating. How much debt is too much debt to the earth. It is past time to quantify and make personal choices about these matters. Because now more than ever, we must all try to live more deliberately. Animals do it. Remember, we are all dependent upon each other on this planet. That is the cycle of energy, it begins with the sun and works it’s way through the whole chain of living things. Those fish eating the micro plastic swimming in the toxic sludge of plastic breaking down are the same fish making it onto your plate. Those fish, who should be eating plankton which absorbs it’s energy from the sun itself. Instead they consume plastic. We call it barbaric, the way animals kill each other for the energy needed for them to keep on going…. But who is more barbaric? Those thoughtlessly destroying the planet for all life for a green piece of paper? Or the animals putting in the energy to meet immediate needs, without stealing the future from their children and grandchildren into posterity? 

Recently a couple of books have been influential to my thinking the first I have mentioned another I have mentioned in the past but I will mention it again. Because I think it deserves to be on the book shelf of every homesteader. Following Nature’s Lead by M.D. Usher. This one is quite academic. It isn’t an easy read. I am glad I was reading it at the same time as The Accidental Naturalist. I found they fit together in some respects quite nicely. But this latter book may be the single most important book I have perhaps ever read or ever will read, especially as a homesteader. 

Perhaps I have been out here too long…
Perhaps goat milk has gone to my brain…
But I am concerned.
Thank you for reading
Amanda of Wildflower Farm