It's no surprise that I came to the book "50 Things Kids Can Do To Save The World". The world decided for me that I was going to be an environmentalist. Some of my first and most indelible memories are images of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead birds, fish, ect... covered in oil all from ONE accident.
Like many young Michiganders I grew up spending many a hot summer day on the beaches of Lake Michigan. Too see an area similar to one of my happy places turned to ruin in days... leaves a mark on your brain similar to the first time your family pet dies. I love this and something terrible has happened to it.
You have to treasure the good things in your life while you have them, and that includes the natural beauty around you. That was something I learned early.
It is also true that kids latch on to things and don't let them go. I got in to recycling, big time. The local community waste transfer center started a recycling option for some materials, it cost more than just sending stuff in the regular trash but I made my parents feel bad about it until I won, which wasn't all the time but was often enough. I am sure I whined my way in to a few toys at the store but what I remember is all the times I guilt tripped my folks in to paying extra to dispose of all the soup cans I had crushed in the recycling. It was important to me right up to first time I learned a dirty truth about recycling.
IT DOESN'T ALL GET RECYCLED!
The day care I went to after school was run by a lady that also was deeply involved in the local public schools Parent Teacher Association. She saw how interested I was in recycling and the environment and how other kids were interested to. She organized a recycling drive through the PTA that turned the entire elementary school in to empty milk jug collectors. The deal was simple, us kids collect empty plastic milk jugs, the PTA sends them off to a company that has the ability to turn them in to new benches and picnic tables in the playground.
Then, one day about 2 weeks after school was let out for summer, I went to the waste transfer center with my dad. The center had almost no room in the regular trash dumpsters. Someone from the PTA had taken all the milk jugs all the kids collected and dumped them. As a kid it was another one of those moments, just like seeing the oil soaked dead birds. I thought we were making a real difference but we hadn't done anything and worst of all there wasn't even someone I could cry "But you promised" to.
I wasn't completely dissuaded by the "milk jug scandal". One of the big box stores that is more prevalent in Michigan had a program where people could take back their single use plastic grocery bags and the store would send them off to a manufacturer that could turn them in to store brand 100% recycled trash bags. They even had a program where they would partner with schools if they wanted to be drop off locations. By this time my mom had gotten involved in the PTA and my teacher was too so I grabbed that pamphlet and demanded that my mom make that happen. In fact I grabbed two of them and gave one to my teacher too. Nothing ever came from it and I was on to middle school next year which was in a different building, and the PTA didn't really get involved in middle and high school affairs. My mom also switched from PTA to helping run my sisters Girl Scout troop so me and my preteen angst had to find other outlets. I was also about to learn the joys of having a summer job as I was getting older.
That was of course another early lesson in the valuation of environmental action. Living with moral convictions and principles is great but you sometimes you have to address more basic needs first, like what ever things a teenager needs money for.
As a Michigander there was always another form of recycling, and it paid. Michigan's ten cent bottle deposit was yet another way that I learned from an early age that there was value in recycling. In this case, people pay a deposit on cans and bottles and if they throw them on the side of the road that is money for me, all I have to do is go pick it up.
As a kid this was a more lucrative venture than allowance from my parents, especially in the summer. There were so many nice lakes around us and then Lake Michigan just 20 miles away that people from Chicago came and vacationed at the local lake houses all summer long. To the visitors the cans were trash but me and my friends knew better. As we got older and our parents trusted us more, we could collect enough money in bottle deposits on the bike ride to the beaches of Lake Michigan to buy something to eat and drink while we hung out at the beach. (In public life I was known to always be fighting weight loss but back then I was young and active.)
Youthful optimism gives way to cold hard reality. As I approached the age when I would be driving I also started caring more about having my own money. I collected pop bottles off the side of the road and out of trash cans in to adulthood but I also got real jobs. While the Michigan bottle return at the stores is a cultural institution, fifteen dollars in bottle returns is a full grocery cart of bottles that takes time to feed in to the machines that count and crush your bottles. As a young adult I saw people collecting cans to fund fishing trips to Canada, Relay For Life even did bottle collections, but no one lives off of that. For all the short comings of Michigan's bottle deposit system it does keep trash out of the ditch on the side of the road.
I didn't get interested in the environment from my parents. We always collected cans and bottles and took them to the store and my parents always identified as Democrats, but they were labor union Democrats that cared more about economic and fair labor practice issues. They agreed with the importance of protecting the environment but we were also poor working class people that were more concerned with things like inflation and class mobility.
Both of my parents were civic minded people, dad was involved in the union and mom was involved in Girl Scouts and the PTA. I had that role model of community engagement but it still came back to seeing oil spills and reports about global warming that made me always latch on to the environment.
I always wanted to be involved in science. I remember as a young kid telling my parents I wanted to be a scientist. As I got older and understood more about climate change and the environment I also understood the role science and engineering played in both causing and fighting it. I has always been a fundamental belief of mine that science and engineering has the ability to repair the environment, create value and protect the livelihood of Americas working class. Any proposed solution that does do all of those needs more research and engineering done on it.
As a kid I was also asked many times "Can we fix it?" to which I would always yell at the television, "Yes We Can."
Part 3. The World Beyond My World
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