Being More Present in Our Environment

I have always been into environmentalism. I live in a pretty outdoorsy area with lots of opportunities to go hiking, fishing, skiing, kayaking, and any other outdoor activity a person would want to do. Because I grew up in an area where there is such a high appreciation for the environment, I’ve been able to take classes about nature all through my schooling. What I’ve realized while doing research about the environment and taking environmental classes in high school and college is that we need to be more present and aware when we are out in our environment.

Ever since I was a child I bought into how important it was to recycle and plant more trees. While that line of thinking is nice, it’s a bit simple. What I didn’t realize as a child and only began to recognize in high school is how well capitalism and consumption are feeding into the destruction of our planet.

We need to realize that most environmental destruction is done by big companies. It is common for people to focus their blame for climate change or pollution on the small acts of everyday people. There’s a great pacific garbage patch because people won’t stop using straws. Climate change is happening because more people refuse to go vegan. Claims like this can be made, but what’s really happening is that big companies who are responsible for the production of single use plastics, oil spills, deforestation, and carbon emissions pay lots of money to hide their faults and to make sure that they are advertised in a good light environmentally. NPR conducted an interview with a man who ran the top oil and plastic companies in the world, Larry Thomas and found that big oil companies used advertising to make the public believe that plastic is actually being recycled when it’s not. (NPR transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/897692090)

In the 70s when big oil and plastic companies found that people did not want to buy their products because of the waste, they decided to look into recycling plastic and found that it is too expensive and inefficient. New plastics are cheaper to make and look better than recycled ones. Rather than pay to recycle their products, they decided to advertise their way out of it, spending $50 million per year since the 1990s. According to NPR “Documents show officials lobbied almost 40 states to put the international recycling symbol on the bottom of all plastic, even if there was no way to economically recycle it.” The companies spent a lot of money to convince the public that their single use plastics were being recycled, when they actually weren’t.

It’s because of advertising like this that we need to be more mindful of which companies we buy our products from. There is a term called “Green washing” that refers to when a company advertises their products as more eco-friendly than they actually are in order to get more people to buy them. This whole trend of greenwashing advertising proves that major companies of the world want to keep their consumers ignorant of what is really going on in their environment, so it is our responsibility to pay more attention and make sure that we are not made into mindless consumers like the companies want us to be. If we are responsible for our own education on issues like pollution and climate change, we can make more choices to help the environment including holding companies that are responsible for environmental damage accountable for their actions.

The ongoing issues with pollution, deforestation, and climate change are not the only things that we tend to ignore when we think about our environment; we also tend to ignore it’s history. We all may know that Christopher Columbus was not a friend of the indigenous peoples who lived here before his arrival, but do we know about the specific occurrences that happened on the land that we live on? About a year ago, I heard about an event that happened in the area that I live in that no other people or adults that I know had heard of before. In the area where I have lived for my entire life, the Spokane-Kootenai county area, there was a slaughtering of about 800 horses belonging to indigenous tribes. According to an article in our local newspaper, the Spokesman Review written by Stefanie Pettit, “On Sept. 8 and 9, 1858, approximately 800 horses belonging to tribes of the area were slaughtered by the soldiers of U.S. Army Col. George Wright along the banks of the Spokane River near what would become the border between Washington and Idaho.” (Article found here: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/oct/01/slaughter-of-horses-leaves-lasting-mark/)

Pettit explains in the article that Col. Wright ordered the slaughter of the horses to prove to Indigenous tribes that the U.S. Army was more powerful than them and to quell their hopes that they might win the war for their land. There is a monument along the side of what is now a freeway to not let the event be forgotten, but no one that I know had ever heard of it before. The fact that this is not taught to us in our local schools is another example of society ignoring and covering up the truth about our environment. This information exposes the unnecessary cruelty of the U.S. government when taking over land that belonged to Indigenous peoples, and because it paints our ancestors in a bad light, we have decided not to teach it. Realizing that there are probably stories similar to this one for every place in America is important because it changes the way that we view our environment. We should all be able to know the truth about the history of the land we live on so we can validate the experiences of the Indigenous peoples, and help to recognize injustices that might still be going on.

Mainly, these issues come down to the fact that most people are so busy with their daily lives that we do not stop to pay attention to our environment in the ways that it needs. I found a local artist about a year ago who, among other things, paints landscapes of the area that I grew up in. Her name is Victoria Brace and she has been painting this area for so many years (Artist page found here: https://www.theartspiritgallery.com/artist/Victoria_Brace/works/ ). While I looked at her paintings of places that I had passed by many times in my life I realized that I never saw them to be as beautiful as her paintings convey.

I looked at a particular painting called “Almost Spring” which is of a corner on our Main Street downtown. To get to my college campus I would drive down this Main Street everyday and see this corner, but never paid attention to it. Yet when I saw it in this painting, I fell in love with it. I wished that I could afford to buy the painting or a print of it so that I could hang it in my future house someday. Now when I drive by that corner I look at it differently and see the beauty in it that I never had before. When we stop in our busy lives to look at the environment around us, we can realize that the places that we inhabit are more beautiful than we imagined and make sure that they are appreciated and taken care of. We can help our environment and ourselves so much more by being mindful of our purchases, aware of the history of the land we live on, and present in the everyday spaces we tend to ignore.