Imagine this: You walk out of your house to head to the grocery store. You were about to make dinner, but realized you needed tomatoes for your salad. You are a block away from home and you realized you forgot your reusable bag. It is just this once though, so you continue your walk to the grocery store. You arrive and pick up a basket. You stroll around to find the tomatoes. You grab a plastic bag off the roll, tearing it off with an efficient flick of your wrist. You find the huge bin of tomatoes and select four juicy-looking, bright red Roma tomatoes. You place them in the bag and place the bag in your basket. You head to the cashier, put your tomatoes on the conveyor belt, and watch them slide away from you towards the cashier. You pay and you leave. You head home, pull the tomatoes out of the bag and toss the bag in the garbage.
Sounds relatively normal, right? It doesn't have to be though. We all forget a reusable bag sometimes. Of course, none of us are perfect and a plastic bag is sometimes necessary. Other times, however, you can toss a couple of items in your purse if you carry one, or just carry them using your hands (gasp!). But really, what is one plastic bag once in a while, you might ask? Even I cannot pretend I am perfect.
This begs the question, why didn't you go back for your bag? Of course sometimes honest mistakes happen. Other times, we might just be a little lazy. How many times have you only been a block away from your house and realized you have forgotten your bag but "haven't had time" to go back for it. Right there, the idea that we don't have time for things is the problem. I am quite sure that 90% of the time we actually do have a spare five minutes, it is just easy to tell ourselves that our schedule is more important than one little plastic bag.
This is hubris. Pure, unadulterated hubris. You may be thinking, this is not normally an adjective used to describe busy people or people at the grocery store. Think of it this way: Are those five minutes so important that you are willing to let your metaphorical child, grandchild, and great-grandchild carry that bag for you for their entire lives? Are you willing to let that bag become a family heirloom? Are you so important that these five minutes of your time must be commemorated forever? That bag, that saved you five minutes of your day, will be one of many continuing to choke the earth, the air, and of course sea creatures, for generations. Sounds extreme right? It isn't really though, just fact.
Now, if that seems abstract to you, imagine if you had to carry that bag around until it disintegrated. Where would you keep it? Under your sink? In a closet? You would want it away from you. No one wants to carry around a plastic bag every day forever. What if you had to though? What if you actually had to deal with your own rubbish? How much worse would this be if you didn't just have to carry that one bag, but each bag for every time you decided your five minutes was more important than the earth's five minutes? You wouldn't be able to carry all those five-minute-bags eventually.
Unfortunately, those bags have to go somewhere, even though you, with your extremely important five minutes, can throw it away, never to be seen by your eyes again. By deciding your five minutes was so important you couldn't go back and grab your reusable bag, you have stated that you are more important than everyone who has to carry that bag for you later. That is what we are forcing on generations still to come. In fact, we are forcing current generations to deal with this in some regions. We are forcing animals to deal with this too.
All this is not to say that we have to be perfect and we all must take bags and guilt to our graves. Honest mistakes happen, and we are not always in situations where we have control. All we can do is our best. However, the next time you are only a block away from home, turn around and go get your bag. It is only five minutes for you, and you are important enough to save the earth an eternity of choking.
This post was inspired by this article in Outside Magazine.
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