~Many people rely on the convenient, easy ways of living in this age of fast food, plastic packaging and rapid development. Most people do not care to see why they live the way they do or what it takes to live in such a way. Toxic pollutants leaching into our earth and water should not be worth the convenience! Third world women working in dusty, cramped factories to make designer purses for fifteen year old girls. Garbage is America’s biggest export and it ends up in China, on the coast of Somalia... anywhere that American citizens won’t be bothered to see it.

~What does it mean to buy a pack of plastic razors? Some metal, some chemicals, some plastic, more plastic for packaging. Use a razor a few times and toss it in the garbage. Somewhere, maybe at La Chureca, someone will pull the rusted metal and plastic from the landfill. They might make one US dollar per day collecting scraps of aluminum, glass, plastic and other scrap metals. What does it mean to wear deodorant? The plastic stick isn’t reusable. The ingredients are highly toxic. Aluminum-based antiperspirants have been linked to Alzheimer's and cancer. Soap comes in plastic bottles, coffee makers made of plastic, water bottles made of plastic… hell, my plastic shower curtain came wrapped in plastic packaging.

~Americans are lucky. Indoor plumbing with quality water. Green lawns and exotic flower beds. Buy and use, throw away and repeat. Big corporations pay off politicians to pollute. Industrial waste, land erosion, low air quality, pesticides. Why are we so quick to trust an artificial sweetener being promoted by a company that makes poison? They call you a hippy, a conspiracy theorist. They tell you that you only live once and to stop being so worried about it all. I ask them, how can you look away? Deforestation and destruction are all around. Those that profit are not concerned with what happens to the land after the loggers and miners have left the ground scarred and desolate.

~Modern living is a hoax. Yeah, you get around quick in your car but at what cost? Carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses choking us and everything alive that lives with us and cannot speak. Can’t you walk to the corner store? Can’t you grow a few things in the garden or in the windowsill? When was the last time you saw a sunset and didn’t take a picture of it? Dairy cows packed together so tight they can’t turn around for your glass of milk. The disconnect is everywhere. Overpopulation. Overconsumption. People don’t care.

~They can choose. They can choose paper over plastic. They can buy a water filter instead of 20 plastic bottles. They can bike to work. Anyone can lessen their impact, anyone can think more deeply and live more sustainably. But we’ve made it so easy to be lazy. We’ve become so dependent that we’re forgetting to use technological gains to make the way we do things better. We’ve come so far that we’re forgetting what brought us here.

~

‘We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire – a crackpot machine – that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate.’ Edward Abbey

‘In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of western overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model fuelling the overconsumption of the West.’ Kavita Ramdas

‘Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.’ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

‘Globalisation, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenising locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system – centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for export – designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market.’Helena Norberg-Hodge

‘Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonise-destroy-move on.’ Garrett Hardin

for SJH

Even when most frozen,
the soil of the heart
contains the possibilities
of fresh and better life.
Water it; tend it; nurture it.
Wait for the warmth to return.
Many flowers wait to blossom.
New bouquets for new days.
  - mce

My garden once was green and lush.
Until on mass there came a mush
of leaf munching slimy things.
Vegetation annihilating thugs…
…an invasion of Spanish Slugs.

I’ve tried to stop them but I can’t.
They’ve decimated every plant.
In my shrubbery they dine like kings.
Sombrero wearing baronets…
…proudly clacking their castanets.

There were some roses, once, a long time ago.

They grew out of nothing, out of a tiny seed that burst and ****** its contents out into the new and terrifying air, and even then they didn't exist but for the idea that one day they might.

There were some roses, once:

the product of a process that included water and light and the removal of weeds and the implementation sharp protection from predators: deer and birds and squirrels and the like.

There were some roses once:

great surges of crimson fruit that bloomed so fiercely in their rebellion against the surrounding thorns
dedicated to the protection of the home of the finely spun veined silk that blossomed almost overnight.

There were some roses once:

Never has such beauty been guarded so staunchly;

and with good reason, for the rose in its radiance has but one short season to stretch its arms and breathe its perfume to which all lovers beg and swoon.

There were some roses once:

They faded,
green
then red
then crimson
then purple and umber.

But in their slumber we see the bloom we once beheld on that summer day.

We fondled their petals, hastened their decay.

There were some roses once, a long time ago.

They had to die, as if on cue, as living things tend to do,
and oh, they dried so elegantly!
Plainly meant for royalty.

And even in their most brittle form, they're somehow warm
Somehow still new.

So you plant some more, you cut the weeds, you draw blood on their thorny guards,
knowing that it's not for you, but for the birds in their back porch churchyard.

And the moment the first rose peers around from inside the womb, well
there's your reward,

to forward the growth of something so fragile and sweet.

So ruthless if you aren't aware of its teeth.

As I dig into the soil
I feel more and more grounded
More and more connected
To reality
It's very calming
The sun beats on my back
The birds are chirping
Soil cracks under the shovel
I take a sip of ice cold water
I look into the clear blue
Sky
Life is beautiful today