Planet Fret Three
Back in 2010, I wrote ‘Planet Fret’, where I worried about the impact that humans are having on our home. I worried about oil usage and plastic usage and generally about the throwaway society that we live in. I worried that we were doing irreparable damage through a life-style that was at odds with any type of conservation.
Then four years ago, I revisited it with fears that we had just crossed the 1° threshold of warming our planet and that there was little to no sign of us slowing down the damage.
So, now in 2019, many things are happening, very few of them are actually pushing us in a direction that will benefit future generations though.
In the US, the president is the chief of the national climate change denial club. As such, sadly, climate change has become a political issue. The deniers all line up with one side, which happen to also be the heavily religious side. Global warming, climate change, call it what you will is now a belief issue too, if you are a god-fearing Republican, you do are by definition a climate change denier and on a mission to burn as much coal and fossil fuel as possible to any the other side.
I really worry about the impact that our modern lifestyle has on the planet, not just the insistence that everyone should own a car, which then sits around for 95% of its life, slowly crumbling to rust, not just that we still burn coal and other fossil fuels for our energy, but now also because of our appalling inability to clean up after ourselves and our fantastically appalling use of plastics and our innate inability to consider the impact on our environment. The rafts of plastic in the oceans are utterly unforgivable.
We have dumped so much plastic into our oceans that we have floating islands of the stuff, the Great Pacific garbage patch is a huge environmental disaster that is going to take a massive effort to deal with.
Microplastics are a part of our diet, a part of US, this cannot be healthy, surely ?
We personally recycle as much of our rubbish as possible. Each week we put several recycle bags out containing paper, recyclable plastics etc., we also save all of our food waste, garden wastes and then finally the small bag of ‘trash’.
What happens to it all is a little bit of a mystery, we are lucky to live in an area that has decent recycling services, much of the waste, which in our case is a lot of packaging, gets recycled, the food and garden waste is highly compostable too, which leaves only a small trash footprint for us.Â