Me, picking up plastic on a beach in Bali during my honeymoon.
I've caught Morris on more than one occasion eating the needles of the plastic Christmas tree at home. Plastic? You may ask. Yes, buying a real tree every year, carrying it home and cleaning up the needles that fall every day feels like too much work. But talking about Morris and his diet of PVC spruce, I wonder how much plastic the poor cat has consumed since he came to live with us. This animal has an insatiable appetite, and if you leave anything edible in sight - WHAM! he pounces on it, whether it's wrapped in plastic or not. Bagged biscuits, bags of cat snacks that smell like dead fish, bags of bread, bags of panettone, you name it. The last plastic panettone binge cost him dearly, and he has spent three days half-sick and in a worse mood than he usually treats us to. All these episodes have made me reflect on the amount of plastic we have at home. I am horrified.
In 2017 my daughter was born, and every time I go on maternity leave, I develop an improvement project of sorts. That time, I decided to reduce the amount of packaging in the house to a minimum. Once a month, we all took the train to one of those "zero waste" shops in Malmö, and there, we spent a small fortune buying legumes, chocolate, nuts, soap, detergent, and everything else we could think of. We would put them in our cloth bags, eat in a local restaurant, and catch the train back home. The truth is that it was a magnificent plan, uncomfortable but magnificent. In 2020, with the pandemic, we stopped going. In fact, we stopped going anywhere. We are on the verge of 2024 and haven't returned, so the amount of plastic in the house has been increasing gradually. I am ashamed of our laziness. It worries me a lot because I have climate anxiety, which is apparently a diagnosis. I now walk around my house wondering which of my belongings contribute to global warming. All of them, I know.
Back to my Christmas tree, I once heard my boss say that the carbon footprint of just one tree like mine is equivalent to about 5000 real fir trees, I don't know how accurate the calculation is. However, as I'm not going to have five hundred Christmases, let alone five thousand, the math doesn't add up and all I can think is that I've screwed up. I was sure that having an “unrottable” (let’s make that a word) tree would do something to save the world from the impending holocaust, and all I've done is dig my own grave a little deeper.
At least I have signed up P to the scouts. The scouts will save the world, even if they have a Christmas campaign of selling felled trees to raise money. I am pretty sure I can trust the scouts not to make such a big mistake as contributing to deforestation to raise money so they can spend more time in the forest.
It does seem that the scouts are doing it right. I have a friend who studied forestry and he was telling me that for the forest to survive it has to produce. And then he told me that the maintenance of the woods with scheduled logging is necessary. Once, outside the FNAC*, he started a conversation with a Greenpeace volunteer who wanted to save the world by stopping the tree cutting in forests all together. When my friend told him about sustainability and planned logging, the guy was speechless and he walked away. I like to think he gave up volunteering for Greenpeace and signed up for a degree that would give him the right information to be able to have a debate like that one outside the doors of the FNAC, or better still, a degree that would teach him to actually do something to change this world from fading away. What I suspect really happened is that he went out for a few beers that night with his activist friends and told them the story about the asshole outside the FNAC who was trying to explain to HIM how to save the world. Quite possibly embellishing his role in the scene in a big way.
For the record, I have nothing against Greenpeace, I just don't understand their extravagant (and, dare I say it, a bit useless) stance on saving the world. You either win people over or you lose them.
If Greenpeace hired me as a PR person I'd change their "pissed off people" angle to a more gentle "we are the people who invest in sustainability and have a staff of physicists working on nuclear fission and a staff of inventors working on cleaning up the seas on a large scale and a bunch of volunteers who spend the summer cleaning beaches so you can swim to your heart's content" angle. I think my slogan is a bit long. I'll have to refine it before I approach them with the idea. Anyway, it’s funny how they are always saving the forests in Brazil and the Hawaiian whales. I don't think they've taken a walk on the beach in Marbella lately... it's also in dire need of saving. But for some reason the world they are so intent on saving is always on the other side of the planet.
To be honest, what I really hear when I see them in the streets asking for signatures is just a version of "Sign here and for a small fee I'll go to multiple demonstrations while you keep taking your car to the corner bar and buy yourself some Zara clothes and throw them away in six months time. Because the world is ending over there, on the other side of the Atlantic, not over here".
All this to say that having a plastic Christmas tree in the living room horrifies me more and more every day... but I'm not going to throw it away. It fits its purpose and the damage is done.
Merry Christmas.
*FNAC: French franchise that sells music and books and other things. You can find one in most big cities in Spain.
This tickled me so much. Thank you for your fantastic sense of humour 😍
Merry Christmas!