A funny thing happened to me recently.  I was doing research for my book centered around trees and Moon rituals, and stumbled upon the Tarot of Trees.  I love a new Tarot deck, and this one was beautifully illustrated, and about trees!  I didn’t want to give my money to a big corporation, so I found the author’s website where they were also sold.  She turned out to be a Druid named Dana O’Driscoll who had also published a book and accompanying journal called Sacred Actions.  The books used the Wheel of the Year as a template for learning how to live in deeper harmony with the Earth in many ways.

I bought all three immediately.  Perhaps not coincidentally, it was right around the Winter Solstice, which happened to be the first chapter of the book (I didn’t plan that).  I got to reading right away and immediately felt right at home with someone who thought precisely the same way I did.  The first chapter about the Ethic of Care reminded me of many of the thoughts I’ve had myself about how perhaps our greatest problem at the moment is a simple lack of collective caring and how addressing that could fix many things.

The second chapter at Imbolc centered on Wisdom and Reskilling was very inspiring.  I’ve always enjoyed hands-on activities and admit to having somewhat of an inner romantic fantasy about being able to live in such a way that allows me to do a lot with my hands.  I make my own body-care products not just because it’s enjoyable, but because they’re cheaper, healthier, and more effective than what I can buy at the store.  They also don’t contribute as much to the general consumer system or the wastestream.

Speaking of the wastestream, that was the focus of the Spring Equinox chapter: all of the myriad ways that we are involved in being wasteful, often unconsciously.  It’s just part of our life.  Being wasteful is tied into consumerism: the more we consume, the more trash we make.  99% of what we buy becomes trash within 6 months of our buying it.

I remember becoming consciously aware of our materialist consumerism when it was time to move cross-country and downgrade from a 2200 square foot house to one half that size.  Everything had to fit into a 26’ moving truck, which meant some serious downsizing.  We’d been together for over 20 years and had a lot of stuff, including things of my grandmother’s after she died.

I engaged in a massive effort to give away or sell as much as I could.  Buy Nothing became my best friend.  I had a yard sale and three “free sales”, and there were still three loads for the bulky trash crew to take away, which dismayed me.  There was still a great deal of use, but other people didn’t seem to see its potential.

As I was discussing with my friends who also happened to be reading the book, consumerism has become an actual ideology.  Those with wealth who spend a great deal of time and money engaged in consumerism look down upon those who cannot or choose not to engage in consumerism.  Those without wealth have been conditioned to think that one of the signs of a successful life is the ability to go out and consume as much as one wants without having to think about it or the consequences thereof.

This is just one of the many paradigm changes that needs to occur to shift the course of humanity.  Not only does consumerism need to be tackled at the societal level so that people no longer feel a moral compulsion to spend and consume, capitalism needs to be tackled at the upper levels via the law so that it stops engaging in practices such as planned short-life obsolescence and designing products that cannot be repaired and must be replaced whole.  Responsible packaging should be mandatory, not an option.

Perhaps the strongest lesson from an ecological standpoint that everyone, from consumers to corporations, needs to learn is that there is no “away”.  The Earth is very large and it’s easy to forget that there’s a finite amount of space to put our garbage, especially considering there are now over 8 billion of us.  “Reduce, reuse, recycle” needs to stop being a mantra only of the environmental movement and become something that all people take seriously.

Until corporations and institutions and the other forces that run the world stop considering profit to be the most important thing, individuals and society are going to have a hard time breaking the consumerist cycle, though.  Everything is engineered to last for as little time as possible, cost as much as possible, and be difficult to recycle, because this is what’s the most cost effective from a capitalist standpoint.  Meanwhile, marketers and advertisers do everything they can to get people to spend what few hard-earned dollars they have on things they don’t need to make them feel like they have more “status”.

In the meantime, the pace of life is so frenetic and filled with so much stress that people no longer have the time and energy to do even simple things such as make their own coffee anymore.  If they do make coffee at home, it’s often in the form of a maker that takes plastic throwaway pods, billions of which are thrown away annually.  This is what happens when your economic system is itself based upon the philosophies of those who do not respect the Earth and may even consider it to be a source of evil.

I’m going to see what I can do to reduce my waste.  Because of time and stress factors, we eat out somewhat often (more often than I’d like), but we try to be economic about it and order enough to bring home to eat later.  That means a takeaway container.  Where I live, these are usually cardboard or thick paper, but because they’re dirty and greasy, they can’t be recycled (though they will break down in the trash eventually).  I’d rather start bringing my own container to take my food home in, which no one will look twice at in the town full of hippies I live in.

Like many, I use paper towels, but I should be more judicious about when they get used.  If a mess can be cleaned up with a cloth towel that can be successfully washed clean, then that’s the best option of course.  Some messes can’t be easily washed away, though: those are the things paper towels should be reserved for, not every single little mess that needs wiping up as our society has grown so used to.

My mantra is “progress, not perfection”, and I believe that every little bit of effort towards a better way helps, even if only on an energetic level.  Doing little things like using rags instead of paper towels where possible, and grinding coffee ahead of time the night before so you don’t have to fiddle with it in the morning while you’re getting ready for work, enabling you to ditch the pod maker.  Not to mention avoiding a possible trip to the coffee shop and acquiring yet another disposable cup.

We do pretty well when it comes to waste.  We generate more recycling than trash, and we would generate a lot less trash if we didn’t have old pets that use a lot of pee pads.  This is an instance of what I consider to be “excusable waste”.  So much waste is inexcusable, though, such as irresponsible packaging where every single component is wrapped in its own heat-sealed plastic bag.  Paper envelopes could easily fill this need, paper that is itself hopefully made from hemp, bamboo, or another renewable and sustainable resource other than trees.

Reducing how much we consume and therefore dispose of will be a necessary part of developing a healthier relationship with the Earth that sustains and supports us.  There’s an old saying: “don’t shit where you eat”.  The way our species is encouraged to treat the planet is essentially doing exactly that, especially in America.  It’s time to clean up our mess, stop creating new ones, and work together against the larger forces in the world who seek to create the biggest messes of all, do nothing to clean them up, and then point the finger at the rest of us.