
What a load of Rubbish
Today's Salty Thoughts from Capt David revolve around the topic of rubbish, and waste in general, as it seems more and more to be symptomatic of our entire societal interaction with nature. It is an existential crisis for some, and definitely a large component to the footprint of our place in the world, as well as our lasting legacy on the ground upon which we currently tread.
This morning whilst on the dawn dog beach mission, I came across a very old plastic bag of rubbish buried in a deeper layer of the bank just off the normal high tide line. It was not really that visible, except to those paying attention to every little thing around them. The recent years of heavier storm surges, or even the Tonga tsunami of 2022 that rolled through the Kenepuru Sound, may have chipped away at the bank and revealed the short term and lazy thinking of some individual from years gone by.
Photo : Summer New years 2024 trip into Kenepuru Sound with friends. This is at the head of the bay in Ferndale.
It is all too tempting to discard general, non biodegradable rubbish into the bush when no one is looking. If you are onboard a smaller boat for any length of time, a bag of rubbish soon becomes rather annoying. It is also very interesting how quickly you generate rubbish. We have learned to buy in bulk and unpack into reusable containers before we leave port as a part of our provisioning. This keeps food rotation in order, and also removes a vast amount of packaging before we leave port, and the rubbish bins. We are lucky we have more than enough room onboard to fill up an entire bulkhead of the transom (the bit at the back of the boat) with rubbish sacks and various sorted recycling. This also means we can collect rubbish from the beaches as we encounter it.
Photo : Looking more closely, it became very obvious what was going on here, with the rubbish bag becoming visible.
We have all been inspired on this rubbish collection journey by our good friends from Kenepuru the Rudkin family. They lived in Kenepuru for a good stretch with their two young children, and made it their mission to pick up as much rubbish as they could, doing some very impressive beach cleans, which they turned into art and posted onto a page they had dedicated to it. The whole project was very inspiring, and simply awesome as they turned rubbish into something greater than itself, and posted the results to hopefully get people thinking about rubbish, how they produced it, and what they did with it in the end. The also gave their children the best education of all in living by the tenets with which you hold dear, and for them, as too for us, walking lightly on the earth is a priority.
At the end of the day however, the rubbish being produced and discarded in the beautiful spots we often encounter are far from the worst end of the problem. The whole obsession the G20 countries have with "stuff" is feeding into a cycle that is hard to extract from. All of this stuff has become cheaper and cheaper, with quality lowering to enable a disposable price point that people are happy to pay for the exact same thing time and time over. This lack of "built to last a lifetime" verses cheap and cheerful, has had a massive impact on the mindset of the average consumer. We are not really able to purchase an electric drill for instance with a "lifetime guarantee" like our grandfathers did, instead we are offered a mid range professional homeowner range for maybe $500NZD, that may last just beyond the 2 year warranty period, or a drill with no expectations for $30NZD. The maths just doesn't stack up. Most people who are casual users of a power drill will find it hard to part with $500NZD, let alone $1378NZD for a professional contractor grade product that is "designed" to be used hard everyday. This is the crux of the whole problem. We have been tricked into a false sense of economy, and the real price is far higher.
"We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
This is the actual quote of Gandhi that is often paraphrased down to "Be the change that you wish to see in the world" Even within the retelling of the words of wisdom from ages past, there is an absolute compulsion to shortcut and "just read the headlines" rather than actually think critically about a topic, subject or even set of policies thrust upon us by those in power at a community, regional or national level. The rubbish we all amass through our daily lives is a metaphor for the way that we are living our lives - being encouraged to buy the junk that is not designed to last, or even do the job properly, over spending the time, effort and investment into doing the thing with focus, intention and commitment. This is where we as a family are now focused, investing into quality time with each other, learning through experience and real world interactions, and finding the absolute beauty in the moments, and the moments between the moments. A part of this intention with having 2 sets of children at very different stages in life, is to find the opportunities to provide the time to read some of the books that have been formative to my own spiritual journey through life. For anyone with time and some absolutely uncluttered mental space "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence" by Robert M. Pirsig is a wonderfully complex story that aligns absolutely with my own desire to embark on this journey from a completely self indulgent perspective, to invest that time into our family as they develop, whilst still being able to run our business via online tools, rather than watching life roll by punctuated by spaces of "what if" or "I wish that I had the time for that".... With the passing recently of friends and aquaintances there is never a more important time than RIGHT NOW to invest into what is actually important.
Photo : If you take the time to look around at most beaches nowadays, you will find rubbish everywhere. This is just the average piece of plastic, on an average beach, on an average day We can all do a little better by taking the time to notice it, bend down and pick it up. If we all did this, and carried that personal responsibility into every element of our lives, the world would be a very different place, filled by people very aware of each and every action, and the reactions from each moment.
