The Final Chapter: My Aching Green Heart

Oregon grown, liberally raised, and spending countless hours taking out the compost bins at my house (:-|) through the years has led me to what I considera rather green disposition. I'm not the girl wearing burlap, promoting veganism and being lulled to sleep every night by the sultry narration of Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth," (despite it being a goodslashdepressing movie), but not being environmentally conscious and trying to do my part everyday makes me squeamish. At the mere notion of not recycling at every opportunity (and in the Northwest there are many) my stomach turns and my conscience shakes an angry finger. My inner monologue turns to scenarios about how if I don't recycle this ONE bottle my children will spend their lives in a world without trees or oxygen, breathing out of tanks, and taking residence on another planet because I screwed up this one so much with how selfish I was. So yeah, I do what I can.

Annnnd then I came to a U.S. Military base.

I feel like the level of wastefulness that goes on here is equal to what the States were like in the 1940's. It's not just Sicily, I can forgive Sicily, they do much better than the base and also consistently operate in a time about 15 years behind the present year, that's just how things are here, but really America(ish)? Really? They get filtered water here on base but no one will touch it, everyone cracks open a new huge 1.5 Liter bottle of water every time they think they might be halfway thirsty. These bottles are everywhere, they outnumber the people here 20fold on a daily basis. No one bothers with reusable bottles, no one even reuses their giant bottles just once. By all means, don't disgrace your precious lips with something you've already had a sip from.

Then I guess we can talk about the recycling. There are 2 little places on base where you can throw your recycling. But why bother? Where does that recycling go when it's being collected? The dump, with everything else.

That's not to mention food waste (but I guess anything that is left out will be had by ants, so not real wasting?), general disregards for the environment, no one caring about anything. It makes me nauseated. I've been here a month and I still can't take the ache out of my heart every time I have to throw away someone's half full plastic water bottle. Every colored on piece of paper a child starts at the youth center: trash. I've been informed it's like this on every military base, and it breaks my heart. There's nothing I can really do about it, or even say about it because low and behold, attitudes on an American Naval Airstation aren't all that liberal. I just needed to vent. And ask that in my honor please be really not-wasteful because I'm going crazy here!