Beginning a Zero Waste Journey

My transition to life back in the U.S., “real adult life” style, is in full swing, and its going pretty smoothly. By the time the summer hits, it will be my longest stint here since 2011. The culture shock isn’t that weird – I feel like I’ve gone back and forth enough now. But there is one thing. TRASH. It is haunting me.

It’s everywhere. What is the deal? I order bamboo toothbrushes off Amazon – they’re biodegradable, and I’m trying to reduce what I add to landfills – and they come in a box about 15 sizes too big, accompanied by plastic bubble wrap so that the tiny tiny toothbrush box doesn’t move around too much in there. Yeah yeah yeah, so maybe Amazon just sucks, but what gives? WHY IS PLASTIC INVADING OUR LIVES? (Not to mention that it is probably killing us).

Trash, plastic – they’re just normal now. Just throw it “away.” What is away? WHERE IS AWAY? I want every trash can to be tiny, right next to a massive picture of a landfill.

I’ll save the continued ranting about why landfills are a mess, literally and figuratively, for another post. But the problem that I see is this: I consider myself to be a pretty environmentally friendly person, right? Or I did. But then I spent some time in countries where trash pick up isn’t a “thing.” See, here in the good old U.S. of A, they just come and GET it for us and take it away. Out of sight, out of mind. But I spent some time in Ecuador, and Peru, and Costa Rica, in areas where no one came to get it – and I just kept looking at my trash. The trash of my students. Where was it going? No where. To the fields. To sit in a massive hole, to leech toxins into the earth, to be burned and released into the air we breath, to just SIT there, and day after day, STILL BE THERE. I saw the chips bags build up, the water bottles build up, the toothpaste tubes. Just chillin’. Not going anywhere.

And that’s the thing! Even if it goes to a landfill, it ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE. Plastic isn’t going to biodegrade. Even if we put it in the recycling bin, most plastic can just be downcycled, and a lot of it either ends up in the ocean or a landfill or is sent off to CHINA (?!?), and since when do we trust China to take care of our environmental problems?

I feel like we as a society as just inundated with all this negativity about how the world is going to shit. Maybe it is. Racism, inequality, climate change. It is hard not to feel despondent, right? So I’m trying to go Zero Waste. I need to do SOMETHING. I’ve already heard many friends and family kind of scoff at it. “Good luck with that!” But it’s actually not that hard! And the first time I left the grocery store with very minimal packaging, yet tons of food, man, it felt GOOD!

I bought two cases of Bell Jars from Target. They were, unfortunately, covered in plastic, but baby steps, right? I have since bought beans, granola, spices, baking powder, lentils, flour – all with jars that I brought to the store myself. I have written the tare of each jar on it with permanent marker, so when they check me out they just deduct that from the total weight, and voila. I am now the crazy lady with tons of jars in the check out line and reusable cloth produce bags filled with brussel sprouts. But I’ve done this in the matter of a few weeks and it is freakishly easy. You should have seen how excited I was when I found a bulk refill section in my local grocery store for shampoo and other toiletries!

I still have lots of room for improvement. I bought a biodegradable container of laundry detergent, only to discover that it is lined with plastic on the inside. I found mayo in a glass jar, but couldn’t find the hot sauce or ketchup I wanted in glass. Maybe I’ll try to make them at home myself with stuff I buy in bulk. We’ll see. I am going through an Asian food obsession phase (I think it’s a result of living in Latin America for 3 years, and thus being deprived of good Asian food), and have yet to find a zero waste udon noodle alternative (though I did graduate from the single use 3-types-of-plastic udon noodle packets to the 5-meals-in-one-package udon noodles). This week I’m going to try making tortillas from scratch and I might get one of those pasta noodle maker things so I can make noodles out of veggies. But, I have already substantially decreased my plastic and packaging consumption, and while I’m still recycling paper packaging and throwing away some stuff, you gotta start somewhere!

(Did you know plastics are made from oil? Like, petroleum?) 

My initiatives for the coming few weeks: making my own toothpaste and tortillas.

 

Wo(a)ndering and Bringing El Campo to La Ciudad

“And so what is the final test of the efficacy of this wilderness experience we’ve just been through together? Because having been there, in the mountains, alone, in the midst of solitude, and this feeling, this mystical feeling if you will, of the ultimacy of joy and whatever there is. The question is, ‘why not stay out there in the wilderness the rest of your days and just live in the lap of satori or whatever you want to call it?’ and the answer, my answer to that, ‘because that’s not where the men are.’ And the final test for me of the legitimacy of the experience is, ‘how does your experience of the sacred in nature enable you to cope more effectively with the problems of mankind when you come back to the city?’ And now you see how this phases with the role of the wilderness. It’s a renewal exercise and as I visualize it, it leads to a process of alteration. You go to nature for your metaphysical fix – your reassurance that there’s something behind it all and it’s good. You come back to where men are, to where men are messing things up, because men tend to, and you come back with a new ability to relate to your fellow man and to help your fellow man relate to each other.” –Willi Unsoeld

Lately, within short periods of time – hours, days, weeks – my environmental context has changed so much that one day I will find myself sleeping and waking with the sun, making full utility of the daylight hours due to lack of electricity, and then only a few days later I watch the sun rise after a night out dancing in the city. The difference in pace between the city and the countryside, or el campo, is palbable – and appreciating what this means is important. I find that the longer I go in each place, the more I crave the other. It can be frustrating when you can’t get away from all the noise of the city (especially in Latin America, where the concept of noise pollution is few and far between); but then all the people, good food, art and music are rejuvenating. When I go too long without going out dancing, for example, I start to crave it, and usually the ambiance is more important than the music – from reggaeton and Europop in an ex-pat bar in Sucre, Bolivia to indigenous cumbia in Cusco, Peru to international electronic DJs in Montañita, Ecuador. But then my heart turns and I want wide open skies, rolling hills, I want green and I want the sound of birds chirping or the deafeningly beautiful silence of no humans for miles, of nature in its untouched glory – even if that means that food variety is out of the question (such as in most rural areas I visited in Peru and Bolivia), or that the water coming out of my faucet is even more precious than usual because it has to be hauled up the hill every day by mules (La Isla Del Sol, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia).

lake titicaca, bolivia

 

cordillera real, bolivia, view from isla del sol on lake titicaca

The distinction between nature and city life, though, is not just about what you can get wherever you are. I honestly believe that nature has a healing effect on human beings, and I’m not the only one. There is a reason why some of the most beautiful places on earth are also so popular with tourists – and a reason why looking out over Colca Canyon in Peru, or the Salar de Uyuni Salt Flats and the Laguna Colorada (red lake) in Bolivia made me feel alive with wonder and fulfillment. Einstein is quoted as saying that “He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.” Research actually shows that putting forth the effort to see things with a fresh sense of wonder and excitement helps rewire the brain to make you happier. In some places, this is easy. I can’t help but be in awe of some of the nature that I have seen as of late, considering the truly amazing reality that so many factors – chemistry, physics, geology, time – have come together to create the landscape that lays before me.

panorama shot of laguna colorada in bolivia

 

salar de uyuni in bolivia

I was never huge into science when I was a kid, but in practicing “wonder” and after learning about the human body in a recent first responder course, I think it is worth pointing out how many factors had to align, just so, in order for all of this to exist today – an earth with just the right amount of oxygen so that our lungs fill with air, with just the right amount of air pressure so that our organs and veins don’t explode, on top of the thousands of miles of natural beauty for us to inhabit (and unfortunately, destroy). I try not to get too overwhelmed by the reports that we have already passed the point of no return in the destruction of our beautiful planet. (Maybe if everyone took Einstein’s “wonder” philosophies to heart and fully understood and appreciated what they had – and may very well lose – we might get somewhere?).

Whenever I look at the ocean, I am reminded that the waves move just so because the moon pulls them, and because of the magnetic fields on the Earth. If that is not amazing, I don’t know what is. And so my contrasting contexts and experiences, between el campo and the city, hopefully remind me to bring the serenity and wonder of the natural world back to my interactions with humans in the civilized one. I try to remember this even when I am pissed off because some guy in Sua, Ecuador won’t stop trying to sell me a tour that I don’t want, or when I am seeking a change of pace from whatever environment I happen to be in – moving from the mountains to the beach, the city to a small town, camping to a shmoozy hotel or a friend’s house.

And if you look at any of these pictures, it is pretty clear that some beauty defies explanation, and that is pretty wonderful, too.

sulfur geysers in bolivia

sunset at isla del sol

Farming my way to Food Appreciation

Sachahuares crops: coffee and cacao; coconuts, bananas, pineapples, mangos, yuca, oranges, avocados, beans, other grains

Main forms of work we did on the farm:

•                 -general cooking and tending to the fire, washing dishes
•                 -weeding/harvesting hay in order to stuff mattresses and make/fix roofs
•                 -clearing and weeding fields with machetes in order to be able to plant and grow more corn, bananas and cacao
•                 -hauling sand up a hill every morning, to use in creating irrigation pits
•                 -chopping firewood and pruning trees
•                 -watering cacao plants (i.e. hauling buckets up a massive hill)

We were let off on the side of the highway in the eyebrow of the jungle, miles from the nearest “real” town, a steep trail ahead of us leading away from the road and into a thick of trees and vegetation. It took us almost twenty minutes to climb to the house with our heavy bags. We finally arrived to a bundle of buildings for cooking, sleeping or storage, some with straw thatched roofs. Set on a slope between all sorts of fruit trees, the surroundings were buzzing with the high pitched ringing of cicadas – even at 900 meters above sea level, this was jungle, and man was it ALIVE.

view of the volunteer cabanas from up the hill

We stayed ten days at Sachahuares, waking up at 5:30 every day, starting to wash dishes, prep the fire and cook breakfast by 6:15 so that we could start working in the fields with enough time to get three hours in before it got too hot. Our first job of the day was usually hauling bags of sand up the big hill we had climbed upon arrival – endorphins, the breakfast of champions, you could say. In the morning our work usually consisted of macheting something – areas on the side of a hill thick with vines and trees that needed to be cleared for more planting, or the branches of cacao trees that were pruned and to be dried out for firewood. By 11:30 or 12 we started preparing lunch, which consisted mostly of just rice or potatoes in a soup with onions or a few spices. After lunch it was so hot that all we could do was strip down to our underwear and lay in bed, nursing our potato food babies and trying not to get eaten alive by mosquitoes. We worked for two hours in the afternoon, maybe watering the cacao trees, weeding, or continuing to clear some of the fields. Then after a cold but refreshing shower of river water, we made dinner and were generally in bed by 9, the sound of the jungle around me penetrating my dreams every night as I slept.

the kitchen

I learned a lot while staying and volunteering at Sachahuares, and not just from all the reading I did during our daily siestas. For one thing, nearly two weeks with minimal protein, fruits and vegetables – being between seasons, only lemons and yuca were available to harvest and the nearest town didn’t have much to offer either – I have a newfound appreciation for food variety and the work is required to have all the variety that you can purchase at the grocery store. In any one meal, think about all the components that go into it: the hours of manual labor that someone may have to do in order to care for and harvest said plant or grain; whether or not it is locally grown and in season and if not, then how it was transported, kept from spoiling, etc. And at the same time, how many people were involved in those processes: local farmers and their families, (corporate) middlemen, buyers, processors, sellers, shippers, markets… the list is endless, really, and can be applied to any product, food and beyond.

the sink

I have intense respect for the family at Sachahuares, and anyone, really, who works to produce food or products that are grown from the land. In the words of respected psychologist and author Anodea Judith, “Socially and economically, intellectual work is better rewarded than physical labor.” This is a sad reality for much of the farming world, and is a reason why Sachahuares has turned to World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) for volunteers to help them run their farm, as they can no longer find people who will work full time for them (the office jobs pay more). At Sachahuares, they are aware of their choice to live off the land, to work with their bodies, and they do so with passion and grace – even taking the time to start a school to educate the local children on environmental sustainability.

some of my fellow volunteers with machetes on the slope we were clearing

a typical meal

I try to maintain these perspectives now when eating food, or doing anything, really, wherever I am. At the end of my time at Sachahuares, I was craving “city” food with a vengeance – and was quite aware of the irony of the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about the Argentinian-style veggie burger that I got in Cusco, Peru at a vegetarian Hare Krishna restaurant cooked by a Mexican chef. Food globalization – global interconnectedness in general – is very real. It reminds me of the words of the famous Buddhist monk Thicht Nhat Hanh, when discussing interconnectedness and the lack of separation of all things. “This is not philosophy,” he says. “This is science.”

the bathroom – we dumped water with buckets into the toilet to flush