As I sit on my synthetic couch, listening to music from the flat screen TV, drinking coffee form another country with milk from a mass production system, typing these words on a series of petroleum plastic keys making connections between metals mined halfway across the world to communicate via electrons across miles of wires and waves... I can't help but feel a bit stuck in the gray area of hypocrisy.
When I first visited one of the community gardens who composts some of the organic waste we collect, one of the volunteers called me out. She was a vegan, and passionate about consumer power and the choices we make every day. And she wasn't wrong. What's the point of making a change like this - diverting waste from landfills - if I'm still contributing to the same problems we're trying to fight, by eating meat from one of the most wasteful, polluting industries out there?
Well, I guess I can't fix the meat industry overnight. And neither can any other vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, or variation thereof. And while that confrontation did make me give up most of the meat I was eating those days, it was a pretty discouraging way to see it. I did feel a lot of shame for realizing the awkward truth of starting somewhere new: I am not a perfect greenie beanie zero carbon footprint off the grid hippie. And neither is any greenie beanie zero carbon foorprint off the grid hippie! We're all a little hypocritical sometimes, and more often just critical, of ourselves, of each other, of the politicians who fail to give us what we want in a so-called "democracy," of the systems that we've been handing down for generations and of any hope for success...
But that shouldn't stop us from trying.
'Cause that's how growth is - it feels like foreign territory at first, and only as we keep going and growing day by day, roots and branches reaching out, do we find strength and sunlight and just what we need to keep on keepin on. And before you know it, you're so much farther along than you thought, and able to marvel at things that were entirely out of sight before, things you'd never have seen if you didn't give your little seedling of hope a chance. The leaves don't know where the sun is till they find it; the roots don't find water till they reach for it.
At first, I just couldn't handle how gross and heavy the garbage was. Then it broke my heart to see all those coffee grounds at cafes going in the trash. And finally I thought to really ask myself "what can I do about it?" and even though that (hypo)critical voice in my head said "nothing - you're just one person, and this is TEXAS" I gave that seedling of an idea of a possibility of a little change a chance. Three years and over 6000 lbs of diverted waste later, I can't deny the growth. We're facing new challenges every day, like a waiting list of cafes and constantly running out of buckets, and wondering when to open a bank account and how to expand and scale with the growing demand of regular, meat eating, honest to God, hardworking Houstonians like us, who just want to try wasting less, the old way.
There are some seriously strong roots here, and it's not easy or comfy to try something that feels so new. It's strange to realize that cities like ours are so far removed from the traditional methods of fertilizing farmland, that this feels like a novel idea. And it wasn't easy to design a system for modern, urban housing and businesses and events, that was retro-fit for creation-era chemistry. But this is my ever growing answer to the question "What can I do?" And every week I find more folks excited to answer that question by growing something with us, and it gives me the inspiration I need to keep growing too.
I keep reminding myself that growth takes time and "perfection" is a process, not a state. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be. And we'll grow from there.
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