“I can hardly wait to have a drink,” a fellow churchgoer told me with a grin as we walked out of the Easter Vigil a few years ago. Ah yes, the bliss when you finally partake of a delight you’ve abstained from for forty days. (Alcochol! Chocolate!) But that was the year I gave up social media, and I had no burning desire to rush home and check Facebook. In a relatively short time I’d gotten out of the habit of even thinking about it. Plastic, on the other hand, I have obsessed about like no other Lenten sacrifice of my life, yet there can be no blissful anticipation at returning to its use.
“How’s your plastic challenge going?” friends often asked me over the last six weeks, and the answer was always some variation of humbling – because I kept failing. Early on I imposed my own penance and promised to give 50¢ to charity for every piece of plastic I put in a trashcan and 25¢ for every piece I recycled. Any guesses on my donation to Save Our Shores? My transgressions add up to a shocking $25! The biggest culprits were trash bags, tamper-proof seals, and takeout containers. There’s not much I can do about those plastic seals, but I’m learning which restaurants use compostable containers and try to remember to take my own “doggie bag” with me when I go out for a meal. Despite my failure to completely eliminate single-use plastics, I have reduced, which means less garbage and fewer trash bags. If you’re contemplating reducing your plastic use, consider other side benefits. Eating less processed food is good for your body as well as the planet. By not shopping online, you will support local businesses and maybe even buy less stuff.
Which habits will stick now that Lent is over? To be honest, the ones that don’t require much of a sacrifice like using mesh produce bags and shopping bulk bins. Avoiding clamshell containers is much harder because I love fresh berries and those Trader Joe’s salads that are perfect to take for lunch at work, but I’m going to try. I’ll definitely keep relying on my Kleen Kanteen and Zojirushi coffee cup and plan to switch from liquid to bar soap, but I might not keep making my own yogurt. (At least yogurt tubs can be recycled though.)
After forty days of considering environmental action as spiritual practice, I’m delighted that Easter and Earth Day almost coincide this year. At this double celebration of life and hope, I’d like to end with a poem in honor of the gray whale I wrote about last week.
Spring Migration
In the lagoon
I could hear my tribe breathing,
but in the billowing open sea
whale spray and ocean ferment
are all the same –
our spouts, her whitecaps.
We ride the tidal surges,
lost and found in her power
as we sing our way home.
The Kingdom of Enough 
“Environmental action” IS a spiritual practice if we understand the chance we’ve been given to support life even with us being so tiny in the Grand Scheme of things.
Learning about what effects Climate Change the most–a massive, cruel and unsustainable agriculture industry producing meat in all forms—THAT creates more emissions than all our gas fueled cars. That made it impossible for me not to turn to veganism as an effective way I could contribute to helping our Mother Earth.
And YES-, I have been inspired by your plastic challenge and am rethinking much of my shopping.
Thank You.
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Thank you for pointing out the environmental impact of meat production. The New York Times just published an article about how our diet affects climate change, and you’re right: “Meat and dairy, particularly from cows, have an outsize impact, with livestock accounting for around 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases each year.”
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An important message for the day! Thanks for the inspiration to keep tackling the problem of too much plastic in our daily lives.
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