Saving The Planet One Step At A Time

Certain things annoy me. I don't know what sort of things drive you crazy but it's the rubbish dumpers that does it for me. Things like people dangling their hairy or manicured hands out of the car and letting their rubbish drop onto the road. Or walking behind said rubbish dumpers.

How hard is it to hold onto your rubbish for that extra 50m?
Or waiting until they reached their next destination to empty the trash into the bin?

Maybe I should stop watching evironmental documentaries. I watched an episode about how plastic gets into the waterways and ocean. It takes many years but the plastic eventually breaks down into tiny pellets which fishes and turtles think are edible. Some marine animals die, some suffer pain for their lifetimes and some get very sick.

I'm not a greenie or a tree hugger. Infact, I'd come under fire if I professed to be one because I have some hypocritical behaviours too.

In Christmas 2007, my family and I stayed at Vincentia, which is a coastal town in Jervis Bay about 3 hours drive, south of Sydney. Early one morning, I went for a walk and there was a gentleman in his fifties, walking around collecting dumped rubbish. He wasn't a council worker or anything. He was a local resident. He greeted me and we fell into a conversation.

Inspiration. It doesn't take a meeting with a President or Prime Minister to do it for me. It takes a person who has respect for themselves, their beliefs and they try to make things happen instead of waiting for things to happen. The gentleman told me that he used to get annoyed at the people who would visit their town for holidaying and dump a lot of rubbish at the parks and beaches.

One day he realised, it's easier to just pick up the rubbish himself and deal with it than to grumble about it, see it every single time he goes out for walks and get annoyed all over again on a daily basis. After he'd started doing that, there were barely any rubbish anymore on his walks and people were less inclined to dump if they saw that it was a clean and tidy park.

I''m starting to understand his mentality. I like to go for bike rides and walk along the river. It really annoys me when I ride past sections of the river where the rubbish have washed up onto the shores in giant piles of human strewn detritus. Recently I've started to clean up the riverside areas. There's no point waiting for something to happen because nothing will on its own.

You could pretty much apply that gentleman's attitude to anything you want to happen in your life. Don't wait for the change because oftentimes, things don't change by themselves. You need to go out there and make those changes.

If it annoys you, fix it.
If it bothers you, change it.
If you want it, go for it.

xx