Extreme Juxtaposition: My hypocracy

So my sister and I had a very serious conversation the other day about how hypocritical it is for me to critisize the way 99.9% of the population lives, while I live in this little bubble of radicial idealism which makes it easy to live the way I believe in.

She has a point: especially when I look closely at some of my behaviors which I know are seriously environmentally destructive, yet I continue to do them. Flying, for example. I laughed through Gore's movie "An Incovienant Truth," because every-other scene was of him on his laptop flying to his next speaking engagement, and he himself admited that flying was one of the worse carbon producting activities humans engage in. I thought the movie was ironic; Gore is telling large groups of people all over the country to fly less to reduce carbon impact, and is flying there to tell them that. Yet I do the same. Every time I come to New York, I consider other traveling options that are less destrictive: hitchhiking, ride-sharing, train-jumping, but in the end, because of the convienance of flying, and because my family always insists on buying me a ticket, I end up flying. I love flying; it freaks me out, I always think we are going to crash and die, so it gets my adrenaline flowing and I absolutely love that terrifying feeling. I know I could get that feeling hitchhiking (I used to hitch all the time,) but it takes nearly a week to get across the country, whereas flying is an overnight trip. Also, my grandmother made me promise I'd never hitchhike again after a cross country trip that had my family freaked out, but I might have to break that promise for the sake of environmentally-friendly travel.

So I'm a hypocrite. I take car-rides when they are offered to me, I eat food in excessive packaging that get thrown away after one use, I still use napkins and paper towels and excessive amounts of toliet paper. When I'm in New York, I drink water from a jug, because I don't trust the well-water that is my only other option. I used to drink well-water all the time growing up, but the water has a funny stickyness to it now that I don't remember it having before, and I'm convinced the larger farms that have grown up around my families' land has something to do with this. I'm scared of pestisides, although I eat fruit that isn't organic (sometimes, usually I get organic,) and I don't rinse it before eating.

My habits definately get worse when I'm not in my bubble...it's easier not to give a shit when nobody around you does....and when you are out in the middle of nowhere, it is almost impossible to not travel by car...unless you want to spend a day biking to the next town over. It is also harder to find organic food, and ironically enough, with all the large farms right next door, it is extremely hard to find quality locally-produced foods, if you don't grow them yourself. Farmer's markets and health-food stores aren't the norm out here...people eat really crappy foods, which seems so ironic, considering that this is farm country. But this is because the food being produced on the farm next door is being shipped to a factory someplace far away to be made into something else...potatoes from "The Muck" out here get shipped to a Lays factory to be made into potatoe chips I've heard...so that's a great example. If I had a car, I could probably eat all locally produced foods...but I would probably have to drive to six or seven different towns just to gather all the foods I needed. I would produce more carbon-shit just getting all the "local' foods then I would be saving. Life out here just seems really ironic in so many ways. So people can't drink water from their own wells out here anymore because of the large farms all around them, but they don't benefit from the food being produced by these large farms either...they have crappy food and crappy water...a lose/lose siduation if you ask me.

Other ironies abound...this is an area of wonderful wilderness: 1) The Finger Lakes 2) The Adirondack Mountains 3) Lake Erie (one of the Great Lakes,) 4) Niagria Falls 5) Walkins Glen 6) The Ithaca Gorges 7) countless swamps/protected areas for birds. In order to enjoy these wild areas though, people buy or rent motorboats, drive all over the place, rent cottages on the lakes (which, by the way, have septic systems that go into the lakes still..!), etc. I myself do these things. I am part of the tourist industry that is slowly destroying the very beauty we come to New York to see. I was poundering all of this yesterday while standing up on this bird tower thing built out in a "protected' swamp area across the road from my friend Holly's art studio. To get out to the tower, you hike through this marshy area on a trail...a trail that is littered by campfire sites, candy wrappers, fishing equiptment that has been dropped (hooks, fishline, plastic lures,) energy drink bottles, beer cans and all the other disgusting reminders that even "protected" areas are disrespected by humans who are supposedly "enjoying nature." I was walking with a dog I was watching for Holly...the dog kept stopping to poop and pee...also the dog was chasing nesting birds; doing natural dog things. I kept thinking "these protected birds can't escape anywhere from human activity...even here in the "protected swamp" they have to endure dogs, fires, fishing, drunks, pesticides, hikers, all sorts of trash..."

What can we do? How do we change the ironies in our own lives? How do I enjoy nature without enabling the destruction of it? On that note, I'm gonna go water the trees my sister and I planted...

Love ya,
Carrot

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