earth warrior

i've been asking for a lot of advice lately

follow your heart

or

follow the money

i'm not sure either answer comes easy but i have found my self less worried by what i do for a living with the comfort of knowing that whatever i do, i will always be an earth warrior

(yep, i actually used that term to describe myself to our friend nathan when we were talking about the nonsense question, "so, what do you do?" that's really not as important as what you believe in)

anyways, it turns out i'm not so unique in thinking of myself in that light. i received my final copy of YES! magazine last week and this issue is titled: be a climate hero

It takes cashier climate heros and barista climate heros to help solve our global crisis just as much as it takes scientists and politicians. It's the little things that we can do (ask for recycling, buy organic, question authority) that really can create a mass movement. It really takes all industries, service providers and consumers to call for climate action. All of the recent efforts to mitigate climate would not be successful if we didn't have heros in every sector.

I can testify and brag a little bit about this phenomenon. I was a barista at a hospital and noticed the multitude of milk cartons filling the dumpsters every day. It seemed obvious that by recycling these, we would cut down on our trash output so I asked the manager if this was an option. A few months later we had a location to recycle the cartons. Little by little, I convinced my barista coworkers to take a simple extra step of rinsing the things and then recycling them. Now, three years later, I help run the waste reduction effort in the Food & Nutrition department at the hospital and every milk carton is recycled with almost 300 employees. Not only do we recycle milk cartons, we compost about 60% of the waste produced by the kitchen, patient food and our retail cafeteria and recycle just about everything under the sun that is recyclable. Our goal is to compost and recycle 93% of all of the waste produced. I can't for sure say this wouldn't have happened without my inquiry about recycling milk cartons as a barista but I can say, it certainly would not have been as extensive waste reduction success.

Earth Day Generation

Speaking of Earth Day,

I believe I am part of the Earth Day Generation

We are open minded
and outspoken

The first Earth Day was in 1970 and it soon become a yearly awareness day in the education system from kindergarten through high school. We learned about landfills and rain forests, reducing and recycling, habitats, ecosystems and life cycles. My cousin Kai, who is in sixth grade now, just was telling me about a week long outdoor class he just finished, where they learned about plants, animals, soil and dissolved oxygen.

But we can't take the credit, we have to thank our parent generation, the baby boomers, the hippies. And now they are making room for us in the workforce and discussions and solutions to climate change!

Make a difference