Ignorance must be blissful…
Ignorance is Bliss. Right?
I have just realised how profound this statement is! I just realised how blissfully ignorant blissfulness could be! How good would it be?
I have heard this saying forever. And probably used it myself a few times. I am ignorant to any context of those previous statements. Because now I actually know what this means! I now realise their must be a certain ease to life if you happen to be ignorant to a great many things. Including the state of our environment, racism, inequality, gender equality, the treatment of animals for human consumption; whether by choice or necessity. Whether by breeding, choice or circumstance.
There are many reasons, and I do not intend to judge, rather to identify my own ignorance of the ignorance of bliss. If one is choosing to ignore it.
Recent events have reinforced this...
A recent interaction left me profoundly shocked and awed. Shocked and awed to know that there are a bunch of people in the same world I live in that are not aware of the critical state our environment is in, and that humans have caused this destruction, and continue to with their purchasing habits, waste and generation of greenhouse gas.
The big news is Microplastics revealed in the placentas of unborn babies! Think about that for a minute.
My every day
Every day for me is about waste reduction, sharing information, eliminating the use of plastics and single use items, and reducing my carbon footprint.
I take an assortment of reusable bags, keep cup, bowls, cutlery, milk bottles, produce bags & newspaper for doggy poop scooping to various places to make sure I don’t take one single use/non-recyclable item.
I’m a member of community gardens, community groups that make sustainable products, I'm emailing council about businesses whose staff are dropping their cigarette butts down the stormwater drain, picking recycling out of the general waste, collecting rubbish when I am walking my dog, and generally being a nark and reducing my footprint.
Every day. My universe, the mental labour of this is a substantial part of who I am. I shop at 10 different places now instead of one supermarket, and that doesn’t include markets.
You could say that it is all I think about.
I have just started a Zero Waste instagram page for my suburb. When I first started it had only 2 members and I was one of them. I had to figure some stuff out. What makes people care, and not care about their environmental impact.
I once emailed Kathmandu and got them to remove a photo from their photo library of a tourist with a backpack on walking down the street with a disposable coffee cup in hand. They did it straight away. Now I am in a stoush with Officeworks about the toxic crap they sell as cellophane (it isn’t), and another stoush with Woolworths about plastic wrapping cut vegetables.
There is too much rubbish in the world and it is killing wildlife and polluting our oceans. And now plastic, thanks to ‘micro-beads’, has entered our food chain. We are eating plastic, and all the while sunning ourselves in the toxic rays of social media, and beating off to the contrivance of reality tv.
It must be blissful, this ignorance.
Meanwhile in the real world
We need to eliminate single use plastics.
And I am committed to the cause. I am committed to making big and small changes every day to make my best efforts to not impact this fragile, and overburdened earth, and perhaps even make a positive impact.
So when I hear from someone that they don’t understand what is wrong with Coles mini’s I LOSE MY SHIT! Lose it. Little non-recyclable plastic bullshit free handouts pointless garbage future landfill is what I think of those things and the Woolworths equivalent - SBS article - backlash over Coles latest mini toys campaign
What to do
If you want to check in about this you need to watch A Plastic Ocean – there are loads of free versions of it and I think you can access one here - A Plastic Ocean Documentary
Eliminate future landfill from your life. It will hurt us all in the long run. And probs eliminate us from the planet. It is this serious. But you have to care.
