On Taking Care Of Our Planet
Musings from a beach on Earth Day
“Yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I’m changing myself.”
— Rumi —
A few weeks ago I moved from the English countryside to the Scottish seaside. While I loved being in the country, living by the beach feels like coming home. It’s where my soul feels most at home. And it’s also brought up some frustration and with that, some new (or maybe old, yet unlearned) lessons to learn because that’s the way things go in Earth School.
Living by the sea and walking the beach multiple times a day has forced me to confront the uncomfortable reality of what humanity has done to our oceans. To our world. Since I moved here a few weeks ago I’ve picked up on average three bags of rubbish every day. And this is on a beach that is cleaned by multiple other humans. Every morning a tractor towing a surf rake sifts through the sand to capture rubbish and a cadre of volunteers pick on rubbish along the stretch of beach I live near regularly.
“To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”
— Bill Nye —
I concentrate my own efforts on the shoreline, to capture plastic that’s either been in the sea and is about to go back or is about to enter the water for the very first time perhaps to find its permanent home.
I’ve always been a beach comber. My mum reminded me the other day that I used to come back from the beach at our cabin in the Pacific Northwest hobbling and exhausted, with my tiny arms laden with garbage (what we call rubbish in Canada). Sometimes I’d be dragging tires behind me. My parents would groan because my one-child campaign to keep the beach clean required them to find a home for my findings.
So, you can see that picking up rubbish on the beach comes very naturally to me. I can’t imagine ever walking past a piece of rubbish on the beach and not picking it up. It’s not in my nature. And that’s where the problem began. Because: othering.
“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
— Jane Goodall —
It was only a few days into life in my new home that I began to feel frustrated. Because the other humans I was encountering on the beach did not seem to share my vision, they weren’t enrolled in my campaign to keep the beach clean. Every morning I would see dozens of people with their dogs or strolling the beach on their own, often walking right by rubbish and not picking it up. I. Was. Outraged. Not gonna lie. One day I saw a plastic bag very prominently resting on the beach with footprints on either side of it. Someone had literally walked around it and/or over it and left it sitting on the beach to be swallowed by the sea. I just couldn’t comprehend it.
On my morning walk I would see dozens of brave swimmers, many of whom would walk by plastic on the beach only to swim with it in the sea. I was so incensed. My monkey mind went crazy with it. My thoughts a running reel, rolling over and over with all kinds of conclusions about what I labelled as my “irresponsible neighbours” and what it meant for humanity.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead —
Soon it began to affect my mood almost all the time. I’d wake up feeling resentful. Rather than looking forward to my morning walk on the beach, I’d feel angry anticipating what should have been a peaceful time. I was very firmly on my high horse, looking down my nose at others, lecturing from the pulpit in my head as I scoured the shoreline for plastic.
And then the other day I encountered a couple who had passed me earlier in the morning and were coming back towards me. Despite how grumpy I was, deep in the conversations in my head, I summoned a smile and said, “Good morning.” And they smiled back cheerily, holding up their own bag and said, “You inspired us.”
Woosh. A big breath came out as my lungs emptied. My shoulders sunk down. My chest caved in a little. Immediate relief. I’d been building this armour around and in my body, isolating myself from others in my new neighbourhood because I felt that I was better than them. Little did I know that in my judgement I was inspiring others to be my teachers.
“ A vibrant, fair, and regenerative future is possible — not when thousands of people do climate justice activism perfectly but when millions of people do the best they can.”
— Xiye Bastida —
This morning I walked the shoreline as usual and again this afternoon. I still collected rubbish — oddly a little less now — but this time felt grateful that I could do so. I have a strong, healthy body that can walk for hours. I have the time it takes to do that. And compared to many beaches around the world, the one I live near is relatively clean.
Yet, despite my own good fortune, the truth is that we need many more people to pick up rubbish around the world because a lot more are discarding it than retrieving it. And we also need to stop making it in the first place. Produce less. Buy less. Because the less demand there is, the less will be produced.
“Do your little bit of good where you are; it is those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu —
Today a cherished colleague posted an Earth Day reminder of the fact that plastics are everywhere, in every crevice, on every corner of the globe. In ecosystems, species and in our own bodies. Last week UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres sent his own reminder in the lead up to fourth session of negotiations on a global Plastics Treaty which begins today in Ottawa, the capital of the country I was born in and still call home.
Like climate change, plastic pollution affects developing countries disproportionately with developed countries often shipping plastics for “recycling” to developing countries. After years of lobbying and long-standing demands from developing countries, finally, two years ago at the annual UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, 175 countries agreed to end plastic pollution with a legally binding agreement on plastics by 2024.
The International Negotiating Committee was established to develop an “instrument” that “addresses the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design, and disposal”. Over the next six days in Ottawa, countries will work to further develop the draft text that will be finalized in Busan in December. The next step is that the countries of the world collectively implement the treaty.
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say it’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem, then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”
— Fred Rogers —
Because while the treaty is critical to creating the world we want, humanity has already polluted this magnificent planet sustaining us in so many ways, and we each need to do our part to right those wrongs. Even if we didn’t discard the rubbish, we still need to pick it up. So, the next time you go for a walk on the beach or a hike in the mountains, a stroll in the country, why not take a bag with you — perhaps even stow some bags and disposable gloves in your backpack like I do so you’re always ready for what I call a flash clean up (like a flash mob but cleaner) — and be part of the solution?
Erin Roberts is a climate policy researcher and the founder of the Loss and Damage Collaboration, the Climate Leadership Initiative and The Lionesses. She is passionate about making change in the world and helping fellow change makers get and stay healthy and well in body, mind and spirit.