Sustainable?

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

I was tempted to just throw this prompt away, but then decided that I really shouldn’t waste the opportunity.

*Rimshot*

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, my Catholic grade school—which was being connected to the world and forward-seeing for a change, since I’ve often accused the Church of neither—had us go out and clean up litter in the neighborhood of the church and school in recognition of the day.

Since that time, I have been very aware of the need for taking care of the Earth. I have always hated littering, and thought we should tase people when they throw cigarettes out their car windows—what makes the world your ashtray? The drought of 1966 had also made me keenly aware of water conservation issues (hear more in my podcast Audio Chimera in Episode 6), and I’m seeing that same situation playing out in the world today. And I have been a practicing recycler since, well, forever; as a young person I lived down the street from a school administration building and scrounged file folders and barely used papers and other stationery supplies from their trash bins for my own use.

When I got to California, I dutifully sorted my recycling into the various bins. The need for this had grown from my undergrad years when we’d strike a theatre set and toss a half-ton of metal pipe or many pounds of lumber and other material into a dumpster, with no hope of re-use.

Currently I do my best not to waste anything. Slightly spoiled food goes to scrounging neighborhood animals. Everything that the city takes for recycling goes in that bin (and I hope it actually gets recycled, but who knows?). And the dictum, “Waste not, want not” fuels the rest.

And I try not to think too much about my carbon footprint as I type this statement of sustainability on an electrically-charged device with rechargeable batteries and submit it through a network of power lines and coaxial cables.

Thoughts? And Please like and follow!