Tuesday, March 15, 2011

More about Houses...and Plastic

As I sleep I pack boxes, load them onto trucks, and stand at the doorways of houses. When I wake the dreams slip beyond my reach. Since the quake in Japan, I think of houses during my waking hours too. All the houses lost. The people homeless and weeping. The piles of rubble. Man made materials melding with  earth and ocean. The toxicity of so much that man has created and Mother Nature crushing it all to bits. How so much of our stuff is unnecessary.

The son of a friend of mine has a tiny house: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wills-Tiny-House/104607962954040.  My friend and I traveled for months when we were twenty years old, our belongings on our backs. What I owned then wouldn't even fill the wall unit I have in my living room now. I have only a fraction of the stuff I had when I was married. I walked away with only what I wanted, and it still filled a small moving van.  

35% of fish in certain parts of the Pacific have plastic in their bellies. The earthquake and tsunami is a human and ecological tragedy of immense proportions. I try not to buy plastic. I haven't drunk bottled water in two or three years. Orange juice sometimes, but mostly I just eat the orange. Thank god, wine and gin come in glass bottles, but the Greek yogurt I like comes in plastic. 

I'll be heading back to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a month-long writer's residency in a couple of weeks. The last time I was there I met a writer/photographer who was working on a book documenting the ingestion of plastic by giant albatrosses. This is not an excerpt from her book--it's an article I found on the internet. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1193130/Pictured-The-astonishing-collection-everyday-plastic-items-swallowed-single-albatross.html.  Just one albatross.

I knew a collie once whose nose skin was peeling off. It was an allergy to a plastic dog dish. http://www.vetinfo.com/dog-nose-problems.html

Why don't we just stop making plastic? Maybe we just can't "man up." http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MensHealthNews/bpa-linked-sexual-dysfunction-men/story?id=9048200

I'm going to step up my personal anti-plastic campaign. 

And maybe I'll start dreaming of Tiny Houses made of wood like the one that Will built. 

2 comments:

A.Smith said...

I am with you 1.000%. I detest plastic anything, including my credit cards that I use mostly over the web. We don't use paper napkins, never have. Our kitchen towels are old fashion flour sack type and I love them to bits. I have said time and again that if plastic was meant to be it would grow just naturally out of the ground like trees. What we are doing to this beautiful and generous planet is sick and criminal and I dare not think about what fifty years from now our children's children will have to live with.

I drink bottled water but it comes in glass bottles, and we try our darn level best not to use petroleum products. I was born too late...sigh. There is always a tinge of guilt even when forced to feed the gods of greed by having to buy something that comes inside a coffin of plastic which is impossible to dispose of without adding more garbage to our Earth. Why does everything now, or at least it so seems, come inside those hideous clear wrapping, finger cutting, horrible packages? I try as much as I can never to buy those evil spawn of some sick mind. Do you get the idea I hate plastic? You think?

LG Burroughs said...

This is sad, beautiful, and inspiring all at once.