When the weather is wet or threatening, we cut some corners on our early morning walk, skipping the extra leg up to the end of Huamalani Road (sometimes just referred to as “fire station road”) and back down to the fire station. That’s usually part of our “warm up,” but on rainy days we “go short” in order to avoid the rain.
This was one of our short mornings, and this was the view when we crossed Kamehameha Highway at Swanzy Beach Park. Yes, that’s rain out on the horizon. And, no, it didn’t take long to reach us. Our umbrellas got a workout today, with a combination of light rain and brisk wind. Rain on its own is okay. Wind okay. Put them together, and they can make for a miserable walk experience. Today threatened a lot, delivered not so much, so it turned out okay.
There has been a lot of trash on the beach over the past couple of weeks. We routinely carry bags to pick up trash as we walk along the beach. There’s always some trash left by inconsiderate beach-goers and fishermen, but mostly it’s miscellaneous bits of plastic washed ashore. On most days, we’ll fill a bag several times, emptying it in trash cans along the way and starting again. Caps for plastic water bottles or drinks, plastic utensils, ribbons, ropes, broken plastic parts of things unknown, broken containers, discarded cans, bottles, fishing supplies, broken storage boxes, the remains of colorful balloons, disintegrating styrofoam bits, plastic ziplock bags, it just goes on and on.
The crazy thing is that our daily attack on the accumulated plastic trash is obviously futile. We barely make a dent, and we know there are vast expanses of trash out at sea waiting to be blown ashore and replace whatever we have picked up, and more. So it makes little sense. But we feel like we’ve got to do what we can, make the effort, do our part, however small, and that it counts, somehow. It’s an act of faith, I suppose.
Cleaning up politics is much the same. You keep at it, year after year, even though there’s always another disappointment down the road, and we’re never going to eliminate corruption and greed. But we keep chipping away at it. Another act of faith. A belief that a better community, a cleaner beach, is possible.
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A wave of garbage will be reaching your beach from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2013. Five years later, an even bigger wave of that trash will hit Hawaii.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/04/08/bc-japan-tsunami-debris-drift.html
We might wonder at how that will affect tourism in Hawaii, but a bigger question will be how it will affect ocean life, as the trash breaks up into bite-size pieces. No more da kine sashimi.
Also, along with picking up garbage, one strategy is to simply buy less stuff. Personally, I hardly buy anything nowadays except technology (e.g., a new computer every three years), books and food. If I went to the library more, I probably would not buy books so often (although I buy used books, generally). Also, aside from my addiction to eggs, I have curiously become a vegetarian without really trying, just gradually cutting out things from my diet as my taste changes (e.g., I cut sugar out of my drinks, like from my coffee, a year ago, and recently I simply stopped using cream, which would have seemed unthinkable two years ago).
Also unexpected is that people in my immediate circle have adopted some of my austerity. They are healthier and have saved a bit of money (they don’t buy meat or eat out anymore that much). What started as a small experiment on my part has snowballed without much effort.
Great analogy! Thanks for the inspiration.
Indeed, I feel renewed hope that not all is lost!
As someone who spends a lot of time dealing with solid waste management issues – including planning/coordinating community service projects, holding recycling drives & educating the public about The Four Rs as well as working on public policy matters such as landfills, illegal dumping & single-use bag bans, etc. – it really does help to read something like this..