Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Day Seventy-Nine - No Plastic This Week

Live Simply So Others Can Simply Live

A very well-known eco-blogger, Crunchy Chicken, was hit hard this week with the tragic news that her husband has been diagnosed with an incurable form of blood cancer. In her Sunday post she questioned how one can balance their personal ethics with environmentalism. You see, she and her family have worked very diligently to reduce their plastic consumption this year and she is now being faced with having her husband hospitalized and being treated with copious amounts of plastic tubing, disposable gloves, bags of IV, etc.

She feels that "because I do so much more that I think, for chrissakes, I've earned a little extra plastic consumption for a while". I agree wholeheartedly. Plastic is not all evil gloom and doom, it can serve some very useful purposes. It's the little plastic toys, grocery bags, ziplocs, diapers and other disposables that need to be cut -- not lifesaving equipment.

So, in a show of solidarity for Crunchy Chicken, many of her readers have suggested that we all do a little extra right now, to offset her husbands' very LEGITIMATE and NECESSARY use of plastic. Therefore, I will be refraining from purchasing anything plastic this week. Maybe you could too. Who knows, we might all discover a number of things we can live without.

Hang in there, Crunchy Chicken. 'Burbanmom will be thinking of you and your family...

1 comment:

Yodood said...

Man is rich by the things he can afford to live without.
—— I forget which of many Buddhists I have read wrote this particular arrangement of words, but they and you and Thoreau have all said it. Simplify, simplify.