Choose to be a little inconvenienced

I’ve been thinking a lot about how doing the most earth-friendly, healthy thing is often a bit more “inconvenient” than just maintaining status quo. Like remembering to bring your bags to the store, making a dinner from scratch rather than processed or take out, dealing with recycling and composting… things like that.

When you think about what our grandparents (or parents depending on your age) had to do during the depression or war times, it is just laughable. We throw away items all the time that they would have been saved or mended. Even foil would have been washed and saved and reused. It’s time to get back to that mentality. People could get behind it in the past because they felt their efforts were helping with the war, or they had to do it out of no other option. We have the luxury right now, or choosing to do what is best and of making that inconvenient choice. And the more times you make that choice, it becomes less inconvenient.

I’ve been watching the Middle School kids during lunch a couple of weeks ago as we rolled out the composting and real silverware instead of disposable plastic. It’s added a little extra work for them to not just dump everything into the garbage, but instead take a few seconds to drop their silverware off, dump just the food waste into one bin, recycle any cans, and finally throw all garbage into the last one. It’s annoying. I can see it in their faces as they have to think about where to put everything. There is also a place to leave any unopened food items and fruit. I’m not even sure this will work without an adult monitoring it every day. I’ll post more about this soon.

We have to do the right thing, simply because it’s the right thing to do. Not because someone makes us or watches us.

We are actually at war. It’s an inconvenient war that doesn’t want to be acknowledged. We are going to run out of resources for our population and our planet at our current rate of consumption.