I admit it. Sigh Looking at them on the table tonight, I was and am part of the problem.
I spend a lot of my working and creative life being (and believing I am) part of the solution. Just the last 3 days alone, I have had two meaningful discussions about developing more sustainable packaging and why Pure Thai Naturals CAN'T have more plastic, or cheap Chinese chemically treated wood. That it MATTERS that I somehow procure something natural & different that fits with who I am and the natural-organic products I produce.
In my "other" professional life, in Australia, I was a fountain pen devotee. Always carried an elegant one, and everyone knew it. I adore the sound of a fine nib scratching on elegant paper, and the smell of good ink is bordering on orgasmic for me. I have always loved the sustainable nature of them, despite occasional bad flashbacks to the nuns and the all-too-many-sore-rapped knuckles in the quest for ladylike penmanship. Several reconstructive hand surgeries have rendered my penmanship more along the lines of a rushed emergency room doctor after a torrid 30 hour shift, and yet my love of good pens and the art of writing continues.
Fast forward 16 years - I am delivering my sustainable, hand-made herbal products to various outlets and customers here in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, multiple times per day. And I lose about 20 pens a week. I fill in the product sales sheet, cheerfully hand it over with my pen for my client's OK and signature, chat and generally get distracted, and they return my copy of the sales slip and the monies owed. BUT VERY, VERY OFTEN KEEP THE PEN!!
So there we were in the big Makro store this evening (think Costco) and my daughter says, "Mama, we need pens again."
And so we grabbed some. 12 for 27 baht. (about USD $0.90) I felt pleased, as I have been scratching around for pens for days and days, both at home and while out delivering. It was't till I was putting away the shopping that I really saw them again and it hit me:
Cheap disposable plastic pens that will last a few weeks, at best, but which will be littering and poisoning Mother Earth for the next 200 years. And I use literally hundreds of them every year.
For the rest of this evening, I have struggled with myself. How did I get this lazy? Why did I let the inconvenience of buying them here in Asia stop me from using beautiful environmentally friendly refillable pens? When did I stop SEEING the parts of my own life that destroy Mother Earth?
The other part of me has been equally busy justifying and reminding me that fountain pens are hard to get ink for in Thailand, that I no longer own one, that they are expensive here and that sometimes it's OK to just use what's there. That I'm a mom and mom's sometimes have to make-do a bit.
And yet I hear myself retorting that while it may all be true, it doesn't HELP. That I CAN do better. That if we all take that approach, our children's children will be living in a sea of plastic debris and paying the health costs of our poor decisions for hundreds of years to come.
I don't know what the answer is. But tomorrow, at least, I'm going to find and use a wooden pencil for my delivery sheets and buy a good pencil sharpener. My clients will get over it, the accountant will hopefully get over it and I shall try to find a fountain pen and some blue ink for signing official documents.
I can almost smell the seductive ink and am looking forward to scribbling and scratching again in a quiet room.
Be Aware, Be the Change