Say It: Cheerleader Saves the World

Say It: Cheerleader Saves the World

…in a grain of sand way.

Among the many things about which H.E. likes to tease me, like my obsessive compulsiveness, my absentminded way with words, and my too-typical addiction to Heroes, is my own desire to save the world. That’s right. Mother Earth.

Like Al Gore, I was a big believer in global warming long before it became mainstream. I was writing my own science fiction and fantasy about the subject when I was 12 years old, for crying out loud—that’s a whole dozen years ago!—and I really did believe the ozone layer would disintegrate and leave us all vulnerable to the sun’s powerful ultraviolet rays, mutating our cell structures such that we all became aliens in our own land. I felt like a fool when it didn’t happen, though, but how could I have known that our change in hairspray bottles could actually help? Or that the volcanic ash from certain eruptions would help cool the earth down temporarily? In essence, Al and I were still right.

I remember debating the issue with my pen pal Janine in my later teens and twenties, when I despaired over the melting ice caps desalinating the world’s oceans and disrupting their finely tuned balance of warm and cool flowing of water, creating not only the imbalance of sea life and their food sources but also the freaky unforeseen extreme weather patterns that could destroy human communities all over. My frustration knew no bounds because Janine is a middle school science teacher, and she, citing one of those “scientists” who believed it was cyclical, disagreed with me. Disagreed! I was crushed. I kept my mouth shut on the subject afterwards, except with H.E., who wholeheartedly agreed with me and who seduced me into dating him by talking about a self-powered home for our future family, and now—NOW!—it’s old hat and considered general knowledge.

I feel like I’m screaming in one of those dreams where no one hears me, and I’m only just now waking up and realizing … hey, maybe the neighbors hear me after all.

…even if only feebly.

But recycling has been a part of my life from the very beginning. Hell, I was born in the Philippines, where resources are scarce. We didn’t have milk; we had milk powder. So when it was time for me to go to school, my mom would buy me a conservative number of pads of paper, and every sheet was brownish gray recycled material, with the rough pulp visible, not bleached brand-new white from fresh trees, like the paper they gave away so endlessly, so freely at the school I attended years later after I moved to the States.

My family recycled food as though grocery stores were a fairy tale, turning any leftovers into yummy brand new meals or sack lunches for work or school. We grew fruits and vegetables in the back yard and traded with neighbors for produce we didn’t grow ourselves. My uncle fished and brought home the bounty. My other uncle hunted birds and frogs and ate his own bounty as the rest of us looked on in horror. We gave regularly to Goodwill and to Deseret Industries, rather than throw things away, and we donated our unwanted canned goods, rather than toss them out. We borrowed books when we could, instead of buying them. We rented videos. We used the grocery bags again later as trash bags, or book covers. We collected our newspapers and magazines during the week and dumped them in the paper recycling bin down the street on the weekends. We collected our cans and any other cans we found and turned them in for chump change. We didn’t buy manufactured border bricks for our landscaping; we collected local rocks and stones and used those instead.

OK, so it was mostly because we were cheap or poor that we did these things, but hey, we recycled.

And I spent much of my childhood imagining tendrils of green life sprouting from the cracks in the walls and the sidewalks and growing, quick and wild as weeds, to overtake every scrap of gray concrete that I saw and hated. This was all long before I even read The Family Tree, so when I finally did read the book, I fell in love with Sheri S. Tepper all over again for being such a kindred spirit.

But never mind all that. I still save the world in small ways, for instance, by borrowing books instead of buying them, by purchasing used books instead of new, or now by reading e-books instead of reading tree-murdering print books. I still give to Goodwill; I reuse paper when I can; and damn it, I will eat that leftover chicken soup somehow, even if it means using it instead of water to cook my rice.

…however ineffective my puny attempts at saving the world may be.

What I really wanted to talk about today is aluminum cans. Since the move, I’ve been collecting them because H.E. consumes an ungodly amount of canned diet ginger ale, diet cherry soda, and vegetable juice. Every week, I diligently crush them and put them in their own bag, ready for recycling at a nearby center. I have a separate can for my empty plastic water bottles, too.

I’ve been doing this because at my last place, my landlord assured me that the trash gets sorted for recycling by the trash collectors, and I took that fact for granted. I asked the apartment managers here for the same assurance, but the answer I got was so uncertain, that I decided not to take their word for it, do the Ed Begley Jr. thing, and start recycling my own cans again.

Then—THEN!—in looking for more information on recycling locally, I stumbled upon this little bit:

Recycling
If you live or work in Huntington Beach, you already are recycling. All trash collected by the City’s refuse collector is sorted for you and processed at a Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF (pronounced murf). Huntington Beach residents do not need to sort trash or use separate containers in order to participate in the recycling effort.

Hallelujah!!!

I can rest easy now and be assured that my entire city recycles, and I no longer have to feel like I’m pissing against the tide. I have that same glowing pride I experienced when I found out that California is one of only a very few states taking strong measures to lower carbon emissions.

That said…

I think I’ll continue to recycle my own cans and plastic bottles. Why? Because H.E. and I consume a lot of fluids, and at 5 cents a shot, not only could I save the world; I might also save myself some chump change.

Share this post:
FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

10 thoughts on “Say It: Cheerleader Saves the World

  1. Seduction by science fiction. Awesome. *g* Recycling paper, plastic, glass and aluminium has been in place here in Sydney for years (run by local government), so much so that we’ve probably become too complacent and are recycling needlessly when we really should be reusing first. In Rome, I was told that they have regular pick-ups for old clothes to give away to charity. I thought that was a great idea.

    Australia just signed the Kyoto Protocol. How we’re going to achieve the targets remains to be seen.

  2. Glad to hear you are continuing with what you have learned from me. Good job!
    I think I have recycling in my blood. Russ laughs at me, but I am still training him after all these years. Recycling to him is a waste of time. From time to time he will leave the empty containers on the counter for me, and I am happy when he does.

  3. Kat, I envy you the Kyoto signing; I heard about it in the news. I’m still pissed that the U.S. was one of only two who didn’t. California taking the initiative almost makes up for it.

    Mom, has Russ seen An Inconvenient Truth yet? He might come around then.

    Also, we didn’t know about composting when I was growing up so we didn’t do it, but have you considered it for your vegetable garden? I’m thinking of taking up composting when I have a house with a decent backyard. It’s a good way to recycle organic trash and to get free nutrient-rich soil for any garden. It’s better than buying fertilizer. 🙂

  4. As Kat mentioned, we are pretty lucky that the local councils here in Australia all have recycling systems in place. Our local council has just started a green waste programme as well, although I have always composted it myself or just dug a hole in the garden and buried it. My husband on the other hand refuses to make the effort. He reckons it’s a waste of time (*ss) and that everything just ends up getting dumped together anyway. He’s just lazy and unfortunately no amount of nagging will get him to change 🙁 Very, very frustrating.

  5. Wow, Lyn, do I know what you mean! It seems like guys are less likely to accept that anything we do locally could affect things globally, and that any effort we make on a personal level is wasted — or maybe they’re just lazy and prefer convenience over inconvenience. 😉

    H.E. sometimes rolls his eyes at me and tells me that I waste much of my time with my little projects, but I feel lucky that at least he’s on the bandwagon. He’s the one who changed all the light bulbs in my first apartment to the more energy efficient ones. We also use motion and sunlight sensing lights so that they’re on only when someone’s around and only when it’s night. Very, very nice on the electric bills. 🙂

  6. Hmm .. those motion/unlight sensing lights sound great. Are those indoor or outdoor? We have the outside motion sensing lights but I haven’t heard of any for inside. What a fantastic idea. My husband is one for leaving the bedroom light on – drives me NUTS!

  7. G,
    I tried composting, and we do it with moved grass. Unfortunately Russ is the one that cooks, and most waste most oftentimes end up in the trash, which happens to be out of sight….so out of mind. I’ll keep it in mind.

    What a great idea, you friend, Lyn has, about motion light inside the house. We have ours on the porch, so when we come home after sunset and it’s dark, we don’t fumble much for keys. It would be great in bathrooms and family room. TV room and bedroom, may not work as good. Our lights are usually off when we watch TV, and we don’t want the lights turning on during toss and turn during sleep time.

  8. Yeah, we have the motion/sunlight sensing light on the back porch; we got permission from the apartment complex to change it. Handy deterrent for prowlers or for when you want to do things in the little backyard after dark.

    Our front porch light is on all night (sunlight sensing), but it’s powered by the apartment complex and we have no control over it. If we did, we’d make it like the back porch light, motion AND sunlight sensing, only coming on when there’s movement at night.

    Inside, we have a motion sensing night-light in the bathrooms for the many nightly trips to the toilet … because turning on the regular light is too bright and too disrupting — it’s tied to the very loud vent fan. So the motion sensing night-light is handy; it comes on when someone enters, and it’s light enough to do our number one business. A few minutes later, it turns back off.

    We don’t really have motion lights in the bedroom, for the same reason Mom mentioned, but unless I’m crocheting, we usually leave them off anyway while watching TV or sleeping. I even read in the dark with my back-lit eBookwise reader.

    We do have emergency lights throughout the place, though. You plug them in and keep them there, but they don’t light up except for a tiny little red dot of a light that shows you the lights are charged and ready for emergencies. When the power shuts OFF, like in a blackout or something, THEN the lights come on. This way, if the power shut off because of a fire, the emergency lights become like a beacon showing the way out, or you can unplug them and bring them with you like flashlights. They last for about an hour or so, and if the power comes back on while they’re still plugged in, the light shuts back off.

    H.E. is always worried about emergency situations like that.

  9. Some interesting ideas in this post. I like your attitude and can-do spirit even if I’m not very good at actually practicing it.

    How come so few posts of late? I’ve missed them.

    You still have your long hair/pigtails/bun, I’m sure. We’d all still like to see a picture of all your hair sometime….either in pigtails or down.

    We had our first winter snowstorm here. It is quite cold this weekend in the midwest.

  10. Drew, I’ve been lazy and negligent when it comes to the blog, I’m afraid. I often don’t even think about it unless someone comments or tells me it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I want to do better, though! 🙂

Comments are closed.

Comments are closed.