You have two homes, your planet and your body, take care of them.
It isn’t all about appearances, remember to also cultivate the beauty within you.
In order to protect our home, we ought to be looking to get as many of our needed items second-hand, as well as reducing unnecessary and frivolous purchases entirely. Especially as there is pretty much enough of anything we could ever need already on this planet, we could just stop production of many industries today and still not go without for years.
Today’s post is to show my solidarity with the social media challenge #fevriersanssupermarche ‘No-Supermarket February’ – that means no supermarkets for a month! Food shopping is to be done at farmer’s markets and small greengrocers, butchers, organic, bulk or specialist food shops instead.
The aim is to detach people from the belief that they must fund overly polluting mega-nationals to survive, and return some cash flow into the smaller, local economies that help our communities thrive.
I’ve lost count because I do the action every single time I go outdoors, sometimes several times a day. If I see it and I don’t already have my hands full, then I’m sure as heck gunna pick it up.
Cigarette butts are one of the leading causes of ocean (and planet) pollution – they are made from plastic fibres that do not decompose but rather draw further pollutants to it over time. They are easily mistaken for food by animals who have been found with heaps of our synthetic materials in their stomachs on autopsy and if that wasn’t bad enough, they look hideous littered everywhere, they won’t ever disappear and just one butt can pollute 500 litres of our clean water.
Every time I go out, I pick up at least #1pieceofrubbish , sometimes more, but never less. It feels quite good, I confess.
I don’t even have to go out of my way, because there is rubbish there every day. Whenever, all the time. Wherever I go, I find.
Today, wherever you are; whether you’re going from house to car, bus to work, or work to bar – whoever you are, just pick one piece of rubbish up this time and humanity might end up being just fine.
Without actually even going out of your way, it’s possible to claim this rubbish today, make it your piece to dispose of in a much better, a much nicer way.
Water, source of life on Earth. Provider of incredible abundance and bearer of devastating decimation.
I am forever in awe of what water has allowed us to accomplish, and completely terrified of what we are allowing ourselves to do to it. Knowing that our brothers and sisters in some parts of our world are more likely to see this post on their smartphone than be granted easy access to clean water is harrowing.
The secrets are many, and our foolishness just as vast. For we are likely to destroy many of these underwater treasures without even having an inkling of their existence, secrets that could have held the key to so many enigmas and solved so many of our manmade problems.
Updated 15 July 2022 – Original post 18 December 2019
Etang de Thau, Marseillan, France
Behind all the glossy, curated, fancy images we see on social media, there is often a deeper story. For every beautiful vista, the reality is that there are bag-loads of loose garbage scattered around just out of shot.
Anywhere and everywhere in the world, in even the cleanest of places, if nothing else, I bet that there is at least one sweet wrapper or at least one cigarette butt to be found on the ground, somewhere around.
Some other damn-good-things Michael Pollan gone done said, “It’s true, we’re way too busy, and working longer and longer hours. But consider that, in the last decade or so, we’ve all found two hours a day to be online outside of work. So where did we get THAT time? The day is still only 24 hours long. The point is we always find time for things we value – and we’ve come to devalue cooking…that was a big mistake…”
“As long as we let corporations do most of our cooking for us, our agriculture will continue to be dominated by giant monocultures of grain and animal factories. Big companies only know how to buy from big farms. That means the movement to build a more diversified and local agriculture can develop only so far…”
Take back this power now. Start by shopping locally for ingredients (with less packaging, favour loose bulk, organic & fair trade as much as possible) that you then make into your favourite meals and snacks for yourself. Why? It feels good to learn new things, challenge yourself. Plus it’s the satisfaction of caring for yourself and your planet. Why would you trust anyone else with something as important?
