Ever since I saw a bird caught in plastic netting on a show, maybe Winged Migration, I have made a point of not buying any produce in bags made of plastic netting, unless I felt a compelling reason. On the rare occasions when I have bought something in them, I have meticulously cut the bags up into teeny tiny shreds—as instructed by something I read somewhere—in the hopes that no bird would get caught in them.
Today, I wanted lemons, and I went to Whole Foods. I could buy 9 organic lemons for $4—if I bought them in a yellow plastic netting bag. Or I could buy them loose for $1 a piece organic or half a dollar a piece non-organic. I bought the bag.
But when I got home and started cutting it up, I noticed the shreds still occasionally had holes that could trap a bird’s leg, and I was still putting plastic into the trash, and then from there, where would it go? Probably into that big toxic plastic continent brewing in the ocean—at least eventually—or in a landfill where it would create toxins for a thousand years or so, and it could do a lot of damage along the way.
Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the lemons in the first place—they weren’t local, and they weren’t sustainably packaged or transported, and I couldn’t really defend it. I like cooking and eating with lemons, but I don’t have to—there are other ways to eat and eat well. Still I had bought them, and here I was stuck with this bag.
What was I going to do with it? Save it for an art project? Maybe a collage of trash? How much stuff like that can I save?
A quick web search, and I found out they are absolutely not recyclable, but they are reusable. They make excellent scrubbers if you’re handy with a crochet needle. Not having a crochet needle or any idea how to use one, but having parsnips, carrots, and potatoes I just bought from the farmers’ market and was preparing for a veggie stew, I started scrubbing.
They do make excellent scrubbers—the best I’ve ever found, in fact, and much better than that nice wooden bristle one from Germany via Williams-Sonoma.
For more info on how to make scrubbers out of plastic netting—or to have someone else do it for you for free—check out http://fatbottombags.com/id15.html.
Yes, my little plastic lemon bag is nothing compared to the hundreds of miles of plastic wrapped around pallets of food shipped to grocery stores every day—and where does all of that go? I doubt they are recycling it or doing anything worthwhile with it—just use it once and throw it somewhere to poison us forever after—but at least mine isn’t choking a bird or literally a drop in the ocean, and now I have a good scrubber.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Gravel
When I was 5 years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to be a geologist--or an anthropologist--but I thought I'd prefer being a geologist because they studied rocks and anthropologists had to touch bones. Whenever any adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd tell them the same. And I always got the same response: laughter, and "do you even know what a geologist is?" I did, and they had inadvertently given me the ground for my aspirations.
A little before my pronouncement, First Baptist Church, Zachary, Louisiana, where my dad was pastor, had put a gravel parking lot across the street from the church in the yard between our house and the Lancasters’. From that time on, until they paved it when I was around 9 and we moved to a new house, I went out there almost every day with my Mason jars and sat in the gravel and collected fossils and pretty rocks. Our driveway right next to the parking lot was made of ground-up seashells, and sometimes I wandered over there too. I studied the ground everywhere I’d go, and if a rock caught my eye, I’d plop down, pick it up, and start digging for more. It was hard to stop--one rock led to another rock. It was a vast field of possibilities.
I rolled round pebbles, worn smooth and shining in shades of yellow, black, white, gray, and brown, around and around in my hands, feeling the shape and the coolness of each stone. Over and over, I fingered ridges of miniature wave-like patterns in tiny pebbles. I brushed my fingers over the rough bumpy textures of snake scales imprinted on fragments of stones, as snakes slithered in my imagination. I delighted to touch tiny stones composed of layers like a cake, or the sides of exposed hillsides, wondering over each layer and what history lay within it.
As I held a tiny pebble in my hand and traced the snail’s markings, I felt the snail in the wet mud, and oh, to feel so small and vulnerable in the world, zinging through space on a small planet in the vast Milky Way galaxy in the endless universe, to be at the beginning, and then to die. What ancient river was the snail — Sara — crawling in, and what happened? Did she just stop and die of old age? Did she get stuck or lost? Did the world suddenly freeze, or a big flood come? Was her family nearby, and what happened to them? What was her life like before? How old was she? How long did she live? What exactly was she? And how were these rocks shaped? How did they come to be gravel?
Every rock told a story, spoke of eons of evolution and development, of ages long lost when dinosaurs ruled the earth and flying reptilian birds soared in the skies, when ape-like people with sloping foreheads and heavy brows made fire by rubbing sticks together and lived in caves and dug holes in the ground and wore furs. I could see them all—pictures from story books—and they came alive in my hands as I held the rocks, fingering them with great care and wonder and awe, loving the feel of ridges in the stone, the striations and variations of colors, exploring the evidence of snails and snakes and water creatures rubbing their tiny bodies in wet clay to die and be frozen there forever. I saw ancient ancestors learning how to make homes and tools and cook food—even discovering what food was—clothing themselves, feeling their way in the world when it was new and just forming and nothing was set in stone—no people in little houses in little towns going to churches and schools and driving around in steel cars to grocery stores and doctors and pharmacists. No dentists. No books—until they created them—and discovering writing and language and art—making it all up as they went along. The bones and the blood, the mud and the guts, filling my heart and my mind with the everlasting richness of life until I thought I would explode or die or myself turn into fossil on the spot.
Someone would come by—a teenager like Bonnie Guins or Gale Guice—and ask me what I was doing and laugh and tease me, “What are you doing that for?” If I was lucky they’d play ball with me—softball or football and eventually basketball when we got a goal. I’d take my little bat, hand-carved by my father when he was a boy and with his initials in it—and stand in the gravel parking lot, and Bonnie would throw me the ball right down our makeshift plate—a sweater or coat or book or something—and I’d whack the ball to my dad’s church across the street—over the street, over the parking spaces on the other side of the street, over the sidewalk, over the churchyard, all the way to the tall cedar trees lining the outside of the church—classic redbrick, white trim, steeple, all-American church—and that was a home run when I got it. If my Dad came out and saw me, or my Mom, they’d holler at me to stop that because I might break a window, but I never did, just almost did and felt the scare searing through me. The teenagers would bore of playing ball with me long before I did—I was like one of those dogs who wants you to throw the ball for hours.
Then I’d go back to sorting through fossils. I collected all the fossils and rocks I liked in quart-sized mason jars, and lined them up on shelves in the garage. I would take them down sometimes and pour them out and fondle them, contemplating the lives they recorded, worlds unknown and faraway, but present right in my hands at that moment. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want to hold them and study them and why those girls who I admired so and who could play ball so well couldn’t see this treasure. How could people just park their cars over all of this and walk on it and see without seeing? Why didn't everyone want to be a geologist?
My friend Donna Harris, who lived way out in the country, miles down a gravel road, had even more rocks at her disposal than me, and they were bigger rocks. She got a rock tumbler one year for Christmas, and we’d gather up as many rocks as we could and polish them. I begged my parents for one of my own to no avail. They didn’t fully support my desires to be a geologist or an anthropologist, and now that I think of it were probably embarrassed that their eldest child spent hours and hours a day in full public view on Main Street of the small dairy town of Zachary, Louisiana, sitting in a gravel parking lot pouring over rocks, as if they were books. They were probably happy to ship me off to Donna’s in the country, where I wouldn’t be so visible to their peers and congregation and potential converts. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I wanted to polish rocks, so I learned to break them up with a hammer on the sidewalk in our front yard and polish them with clear fingernail polish. They didn’t look as lovely as the ones on the rock polishing machine’s box, but they did look better than plain old dusty rocks, and were fun to make, if a little tedious. The smell of the fingernail polish, though, wore old, and I went back to pondering and collecting and admiring the rocks as they were in their natural state.
The sky was bright blue. Flying dinosaurs peered down at me, small and tiny in a sea of gravel. The moist Louisiana air smelled like fresh rain and low-lying muddy waters and sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and gardenias. Giant fish and squid swam through the marshes, as the snails and other creatures nestled down in the silt and mud. There was no time, and it was all time, and I sang in the time, spinning on the earth, flying through the universe, sitting in my place on the round ball of the earth, safe, no predators to pounce on me and eat me, only teenagers and parents to ridicule me, but I didn’t care, who could care when there was all this world to explore and such a rich history and so many rocks that I would never count them all, even in that small space. I could collect and collect to no end, and the whole universe and all of history was at my finger tips and under my small body and holding me up in time without end.
A little before my pronouncement, First Baptist Church, Zachary, Louisiana, where my dad was pastor, had put a gravel parking lot across the street from the church in the yard between our house and the Lancasters’. From that time on, until they paved it when I was around 9 and we moved to a new house, I went out there almost every day with my Mason jars and sat in the gravel and collected fossils and pretty rocks. Our driveway right next to the parking lot was made of ground-up seashells, and sometimes I wandered over there too. I studied the ground everywhere I’d go, and if a rock caught my eye, I’d plop down, pick it up, and start digging for more. It was hard to stop--one rock led to another rock. It was a vast field of possibilities.
I rolled round pebbles, worn smooth and shining in shades of yellow, black, white, gray, and brown, around and around in my hands, feeling the shape and the coolness of each stone. Over and over, I fingered ridges of miniature wave-like patterns in tiny pebbles. I brushed my fingers over the rough bumpy textures of snake scales imprinted on fragments of stones, as snakes slithered in my imagination. I delighted to touch tiny stones composed of layers like a cake, or the sides of exposed hillsides, wondering over each layer and what history lay within it.
As I held a tiny pebble in my hand and traced the snail’s markings, I felt the snail in the wet mud, and oh, to feel so small and vulnerable in the world, zinging through space on a small planet in the vast Milky Way galaxy in the endless universe, to be at the beginning, and then to die. What ancient river was the snail — Sara — crawling in, and what happened? Did she just stop and die of old age? Did she get stuck or lost? Did the world suddenly freeze, or a big flood come? Was her family nearby, and what happened to them? What was her life like before? How old was she? How long did she live? What exactly was she? And how were these rocks shaped? How did they come to be gravel?
Every rock told a story, spoke of eons of evolution and development, of ages long lost when dinosaurs ruled the earth and flying reptilian birds soared in the skies, when ape-like people with sloping foreheads and heavy brows made fire by rubbing sticks together and lived in caves and dug holes in the ground and wore furs. I could see them all—pictures from story books—and they came alive in my hands as I held the rocks, fingering them with great care and wonder and awe, loving the feel of ridges in the stone, the striations and variations of colors, exploring the evidence of snails and snakes and water creatures rubbing their tiny bodies in wet clay to die and be frozen there forever. I saw ancient ancestors learning how to make homes and tools and cook food—even discovering what food was—clothing themselves, feeling their way in the world when it was new and just forming and nothing was set in stone—no people in little houses in little towns going to churches and schools and driving around in steel cars to grocery stores and doctors and pharmacists. No dentists. No books—until they created them—and discovering writing and language and art—making it all up as they went along. The bones and the blood, the mud and the guts, filling my heart and my mind with the everlasting richness of life until I thought I would explode or die or myself turn into fossil on the spot.
Someone would come by—a teenager like Bonnie Guins or Gale Guice—and ask me what I was doing and laugh and tease me, “What are you doing that for?” If I was lucky they’d play ball with me—softball or football and eventually basketball when we got a goal. I’d take my little bat, hand-carved by my father when he was a boy and with his initials in it—and stand in the gravel parking lot, and Bonnie would throw me the ball right down our makeshift plate—a sweater or coat or book or something—and I’d whack the ball to my dad’s church across the street—over the street, over the parking spaces on the other side of the street, over the sidewalk, over the churchyard, all the way to the tall cedar trees lining the outside of the church—classic redbrick, white trim, steeple, all-American church—and that was a home run when I got it. If my Dad came out and saw me, or my Mom, they’d holler at me to stop that because I might break a window, but I never did, just almost did and felt the scare searing through me. The teenagers would bore of playing ball with me long before I did—I was like one of those dogs who wants you to throw the ball for hours.
Then I’d go back to sorting through fossils. I collected all the fossils and rocks I liked in quart-sized mason jars, and lined them up on shelves in the garage. I would take them down sometimes and pour them out and fondle them, contemplating the lives they recorded, worlds unknown and faraway, but present right in my hands at that moment. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want to hold them and study them and why those girls who I admired so and who could play ball so well couldn’t see this treasure. How could people just park their cars over all of this and walk on it and see without seeing? Why didn't everyone want to be a geologist?
My friend Donna Harris, who lived way out in the country, miles down a gravel road, had even more rocks at her disposal than me, and they were bigger rocks. She got a rock tumbler one year for Christmas, and we’d gather up as many rocks as we could and polish them. I begged my parents for one of my own to no avail. They didn’t fully support my desires to be a geologist or an anthropologist, and now that I think of it were probably embarrassed that their eldest child spent hours and hours a day in full public view on Main Street of the small dairy town of Zachary, Louisiana, sitting in a gravel parking lot pouring over rocks, as if they were books. They were probably happy to ship me off to Donna’s in the country, where I wouldn’t be so visible to their peers and congregation and potential converts. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I wanted to polish rocks, so I learned to break them up with a hammer on the sidewalk in our front yard and polish them with clear fingernail polish. They didn’t look as lovely as the ones on the rock polishing machine’s box, but they did look better than plain old dusty rocks, and were fun to make, if a little tedious. The smell of the fingernail polish, though, wore old, and I went back to pondering and collecting and admiring the rocks as they were in their natural state.
The sky was bright blue. Flying dinosaurs peered down at me, small and tiny in a sea of gravel. The moist Louisiana air smelled like fresh rain and low-lying muddy waters and sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and gardenias. Giant fish and squid swam through the marshes, as the snails and other creatures nestled down in the silt and mud. There was no time, and it was all time, and I sang in the time, spinning on the earth, flying through the universe, sitting in my place on the round ball of the earth, safe, no predators to pounce on me and eat me, only teenagers and parents to ridicule me, but I didn’t care, who could care when there was all this world to explore and such a rich history and so many rocks that I would never count them all, even in that small space. I could collect and collect to no end, and the whole universe and all of history was at my finger tips and under my small body and holding me up in time without end.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Cognitive Dissonance
Conan O’Brien stands in a suit and tie clasping his hands and smiling as he jokes, and inches away, a person lies on a stretcher, injured and possibly dead from the earthquake in Haiti, surrounded by onlookers.
That’s the upper half of the front page in The New York Times on Wednesday, January 13, 2010.
In the two left-hand columns (traditionally the “second lead” spot, but twice as wide as usual) and running almost the length of the top half of the page, The Times ran the story of NBC’s treatment of Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno, “the battle of the late night titans.” To the right, under a three-column headline (major lead story), The Times covered the catastrophic earthquake.
A three-to-two ratio.
The picture of devastated people in Haiti was a lot bigger than the picture of the smiling Conan O’Brien, and Haiti was covered more extensively in the rest of the paper, and for the rest of the week, but still, really, come on—the fact is The Times initially devoted almost as much of its front page to the story of late night talk show hosts—two rich white guys fighting with their employers over contracts and schedules—as it did to the destruction of one of the poorest (and blackest) countries in the world by a natural disaster.
Maybe The Times editors were just as stumped and stunned by the news in Haiti as many others, and it took them awhile to see what they were seeing and to grasp the story. Over the rest of the week, the coverage shifted, giving much more attention to Haiti. By Sunday, the major lead was still Haiti—“Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises”—with a 4-column photo of a boy fleeing gunshots, and underneath it, with no photo, a 2-column story on NBC’s woes: “NBC’s Slide From TV’s Heights to Troubled Nightly Punch Line.”
Nevertheless, The Times reported on Saturday that much fewer people watched a TV special on Haiti than watched regularly scheduled TV show dramas like Bones. It also reports that eleven networks are planning a 24-hour marathon of Haiti coverage, instead of regular programming.
The point is not the coverage of Haiti, which is growing so extensive by the minute that in no time, it will turn us all off, but the juxtaposition of these images—so jarring and yet such a mirror of our world: Great privilege, ease, and business-as-usual side-by-side with great poverty and uncontrollable destruction. One is a world where we make choices and have options and have at least a semblance of control; the other is a world where things happen beyond our sense of control, where options seem limited or non-existent, and where there is only a scramble for survival. Taken together, side by side as they are in Wednesday’s Times, these stories provide a perfect picture of our culture’s state of consciousness—both our obliviousness and our caring, our ignorance and our knowledge, our shallowness and our depth, our sense of privilege and our sense of helplessness, our sense of entitlement and our sense of outrage, our determination to succeed and our determination to help those who are suffering.
About the coverage itself, we can explain it easily enough: we are distracting ourselves with entertainment stories; the media is pandering to the public (not only in entertainment coverage but also in its coverage of Haiti); and the media treats the problems of rich white men as so important and of poor people of color as so unimportant that even in the face of major disaster it still treats them almost equally. It’s easy to see how our habits of compartmentalization (entertainment-hard news, us-them, here-there, black-white, me-not me, the real and the unreal) make this type of coverage possible. Maybe we’re so used to such juxtapositions, we don’t even notice them, except in those rare moments such as this one, where they are extremely insensitive.
The O’Brien-Leno story is the type of story we can talk and think about without scratching the surface of life in any way whatsoever—a perfect vehicle for mind (or mindless) chatter. There’s nothing to really feel here, and we have the option of thinking and caring about it or not as we see fit. What happened in Haiti, though, is not something to think about, talk about—it’s requires us to FEEL and to DO something. We have no option but to address it in some deep way, and it hurts—a lot—to even witness what’s happening from afar, and the doing is complicated and messy and brings to the fore all the limits of the world we’ve created so far. That’s one reason people would rather watch their regular shows or follow the ups and downs of talk-show hosts. Still, even if we ignore the story, we know we’re ignoring it, and we feel our ignorance. Over time, media coverage of Haiti will probably turn it into a story that we can’t feel anymore, if we’re far enough removed from the land and the people, but even that loss of caring will at least nudge our consciences.
The earthquake in Haiti broke through the Hollywood-New York Times-life-as-usual-for-any-of-us bubble of unreality, like Katrina, 9-11, and other disasters. Would it were possible for us to wake up without such bloodshed and destruction. May we remain compassionate and alive to what matters most in life.
Bless all of the people who are in Haiti, all who are doing what they can, all who have left this world, and those who remain in it. May our eyes, minds, and hearts be open, and may we find balance.
That’s the upper half of the front page in The New York Times on Wednesday, January 13, 2010.
In the two left-hand columns (traditionally the “second lead” spot, but twice as wide as usual) and running almost the length of the top half of the page, The Times ran the story of NBC’s treatment of Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno, “the battle of the late night titans.” To the right, under a three-column headline (major lead story), The Times covered the catastrophic earthquake.
A three-to-two ratio.
The picture of devastated people in Haiti was a lot bigger than the picture of the smiling Conan O’Brien, and Haiti was covered more extensively in the rest of the paper, and for the rest of the week, but still, really, come on—the fact is The Times initially devoted almost as much of its front page to the story of late night talk show hosts—two rich white guys fighting with their employers over contracts and schedules—as it did to the destruction of one of the poorest (and blackest) countries in the world by a natural disaster.
Maybe The Times editors were just as stumped and stunned by the news in Haiti as many others, and it took them awhile to see what they were seeing and to grasp the story. Over the rest of the week, the coverage shifted, giving much more attention to Haiti. By Sunday, the major lead was still Haiti—“Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises”—with a 4-column photo of a boy fleeing gunshots, and underneath it, with no photo, a 2-column story on NBC’s woes: “NBC’s Slide From TV’s Heights to Troubled Nightly Punch Line.”
Nevertheless, The Times reported on Saturday that much fewer people watched a TV special on Haiti than watched regularly scheduled TV show dramas like Bones. It also reports that eleven networks are planning a 24-hour marathon of Haiti coverage, instead of regular programming.
The point is not the coverage of Haiti, which is growing so extensive by the minute that in no time, it will turn us all off, but the juxtaposition of these images—so jarring and yet such a mirror of our world: Great privilege, ease, and business-as-usual side-by-side with great poverty and uncontrollable destruction. One is a world where we make choices and have options and have at least a semblance of control; the other is a world where things happen beyond our sense of control, where options seem limited or non-existent, and where there is only a scramble for survival. Taken together, side by side as they are in Wednesday’s Times, these stories provide a perfect picture of our culture’s state of consciousness—both our obliviousness and our caring, our ignorance and our knowledge, our shallowness and our depth, our sense of privilege and our sense of helplessness, our sense of entitlement and our sense of outrage, our determination to succeed and our determination to help those who are suffering.
About the coverage itself, we can explain it easily enough: we are distracting ourselves with entertainment stories; the media is pandering to the public (not only in entertainment coverage but also in its coverage of Haiti); and the media treats the problems of rich white men as so important and of poor people of color as so unimportant that even in the face of major disaster it still treats them almost equally. It’s easy to see how our habits of compartmentalization (entertainment-hard news, us-them, here-there, black-white, me-not me, the real and the unreal) make this type of coverage possible. Maybe we’re so used to such juxtapositions, we don’t even notice them, except in those rare moments such as this one, where they are extremely insensitive.
The O’Brien-Leno story is the type of story we can talk and think about without scratching the surface of life in any way whatsoever—a perfect vehicle for mind (or mindless) chatter. There’s nothing to really feel here, and we have the option of thinking and caring about it or not as we see fit. What happened in Haiti, though, is not something to think about, talk about—it’s requires us to FEEL and to DO something. We have no option but to address it in some deep way, and it hurts—a lot—to even witness what’s happening from afar, and the doing is complicated and messy and brings to the fore all the limits of the world we’ve created so far. That’s one reason people would rather watch their regular shows or follow the ups and downs of talk-show hosts. Still, even if we ignore the story, we know we’re ignoring it, and we feel our ignorance. Over time, media coverage of Haiti will probably turn it into a story that we can’t feel anymore, if we’re far enough removed from the land and the people, but even that loss of caring will at least nudge our consciences.
The earthquake in Haiti broke through the Hollywood-New York Times-life-as-usual-for-any-of-us bubble of unreality, like Katrina, 9-11, and other disasters. Would it were possible for us to wake up without such bloodshed and destruction. May we remain compassionate and alive to what matters most in life.
Bless all of the people who are in Haiti, all who are doing what they can, all who have left this world, and those who remain in it. May our eyes, minds, and hearts be open, and may we find balance.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Happy New Year!
One man says to another man on the subway, “I think 2010 is going to be a good year,” and the other guy nods yes, “The thing about 2010 is going to be knowing which of all the opportunities out there will pay off.”
May sound banal, even clichéd, but when I heard it, I thought, “Yes, that is what it’s going to be about—making decisions and choices and knowing, not just going along, making hunches, but actually knowing.”
That was on January 2, 2010 (Number 1 train going south from 72nd Street, approaching Times Square, middle of the day), and so far it’s true to my experience.
May we all know which of our opportunities will pay off and enjoy this new year--Welcome 2010!
May sound banal, even clichéd, but when I heard it, I thought, “Yes, that is what it’s going to be about—making decisions and choices and knowing, not just going along, making hunches, but actually knowing.”
That was on January 2, 2010 (Number 1 train going south from 72nd Street, approaching Times Square, middle of the day), and so far it’s true to my experience.
May we all know which of our opportunities will pay off and enjoy this new year--Welcome 2010!
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