Earth Day

Today is Earth day and I'm sorta in a whatever mode about it. Possibly because I feel conflicted about large portions of the environmental movement. I think we need to do alot more as a society to reduce, reuse and recycle. Frankly we buy way too much shit, or we (as my little family unit) until I became broke ass due to the birth of a monkey.

I don't need to have a bunch of knick knacks or the latest trendy clothing and I'm sorry Mr. Carpet Salesmen a $1000.00 area is NOT something I think is disposable if it gets stained. I want to be able to steam clean shit out. Sorry I don't think I need to buy new couches simply b/c my current ones are 10 years old. They should be built sturdy enough so that I can simply re-upholster them. Sorry but I don't need to replace my 5 year old ipod simply because its not as trendy as the newest version. Why does apple need to refresh it every 6 months? (mind you I was so annoyed waiting for the latest macbook update....)

However, I don't agree with the whole organic food movement. Organic is not better because its organic and buying local isn't always the best choice. Large farms are not the enemy simply because they are large. I may be have a bias since Mr.SM's family business deals with agriculture and because I'm training to be a geneticist and I understand the simply because something is genetically modified does not make it inherently bad for you. Its a bunch of grey zones, which is why I can go to my local snobby grocery store and find organic bananas that are cheaper than the non-organic fair trade bananas. You can't just look at a label, you have to actually think about and know who is doing what. There are larger farms that treat their employees well, pair fair wages and try to minimize their environmental impact because its the right thing to do, without a lot of fanfare. They've always done that.

Still because I believe that Global warming is happening and that we should make changes to our lives to minimize our impacts we have in the past year:

started car pooling
started composting - we have 1 small bag of garbage a week. If monkey could learn to poop in the freaking toilet, so we could start night time training, we'd be down even less.

oh and we use natural light whenever etc etc.