Almost ten years ago, I blogged about the impact of our body weight on our lifestyles and the environment. To me, before “climate change” became a global issue, the relationship between how we look after ourselves and the environment was already obvious. And here we are in 2020 and the fires in Australia have opened the Pandora’s box of climate change.
I have always been concerned about the way we look after our Earth. In the 60’s and 70’s, my parents instilled environmental awareness in me through their own habits: reuse; buy what you need, not what you want; don’t litter; do the right thing. My mom never got rid of clothes that were still in good shape. “They’ll come back in style. You’ll see.” Those that weren’t were donated or became rags. I remember watching my dad make trips to the dump to dispose of paint and other chemicals. “Properly,” he said. My parents knew. Forty years ago, before the phrase “environmental crisis” even existed, they knew how to protect our world.
So now, forty years later, actions like these should be commonplace but they aren’t. Every Tuesday morning, when I put out the recycling and compost bins, it annoys me that there are many families in my neighbourhood who are still not doing this. On my way to work, it bothers me to see so many cars lined up at drive-throughs. And when I walk Zeda, seeing litter along the sidewalks or trails drives me crazy.
We need to do more. We can no longer ignore the impact that not doing the right thing has on our planet. We can’t just “not care” about that one piece of litter or whether our table scraps go into the compost bin or garbage. We must do better.
The ecological destruction and lost of life in Australia is our wake-up call that climate change is real.
