THIS coming Sunday is World Environment Day, a day on which we are supposed to sit back and ponder, and perhaps take action upon, our impact on this planet of ours.
It’s an important day, for every one of us (and there are now more than 7-billion of us), has an impact on the natural environment, otherwise known as our footprint.
Obviously, not everyone’s footprint is the same – the average American family is going to have a very much bigger environmental footprint than a peasant farmer’s family in India, but a footprint there will be.
We were reminded of this just the other day.
We have moved, not very far, but we have moved, from the current Hide to a more compact one (please note the use of the estate agent’s term ‘more compact’) and this has involved an exercise known as ‘chucking and packing’.
It’s a lot more complicated than it sounds.
There are two very distinct types of people in this world, those who keep something in case it might come in useful one day (a piece of rope, a not-very-functioning hairdryer, a packet of assorted screws, a piece of wire – you get the idea), and those who do not.
When we moved down to the coast after living in the same smallish house in Johannesburg for over 33 years, we brought everything, thinking that in the fullness of time we would sort it out.
The ‘fullness of time’ arrived a few short weeks ago and the culmination of the chucking and packing exercise ended (almost) with the arrival of a 20-ton truck to load up the accumulated chucking part of the exercise.
I thought, “We’ll never fill that….”, but an hour later we had. We had filled to overflowing a 20-ton truck with an accumulation of things that ‘might come in useful one day’.
We were quite ashamed as we contemplated our footprint on the planet and that truck disappearing up the road.
The worst is the paper.
One is required to keep accounts, statements, receipts, in fact anything official, for five years and then one is told that one dare not just dump anything with any kind of personal details on it in case someone else hacks into one’s life or actually steals one’s identity (how can that ever be possible?).
We have always recycled, but eventually we had to give up as the bags and boxes of paper grew – and we pondered afresh our footprint on the planet, particularly the planet’s trees.
So, World Environment Day and our footprint on the planet, it’s a time to reflect on such things as the three Rs (no, not ‘riting, reading and ‘rithmatic — Recycle, Re-use, Reduce), and just how we can in our own small way make a contribution.
By the way, much of the stuff on that 20-ton lorry had already been recycled, reduced and re-used for themselves by the handlers before it even left our premises, so, as a very old friend of ours used to say, ‘There’s no such thing as rubbish, just matter out of place’.
And with that, cheers!
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