Rub of the Green: How You Can Help Mother Nature … or Not

Saving Planet Earth is usually regarded as a rather large task, embraced by only superheroes or delusional politicians.

You can, as a normal citizen, actually play a small part in this effort. But like old-fashioned schooling where the first time a student is caught chewing his pencil and swallowing the eraser in class he is written off as a future janitor, it is wise not to set expectations for real-world success too high.

Well, thanks, that’s cheery, Captain Bringdown. OK, you can make a difference with some priority resolutions for the New Year that don’t involve kidnapping the Indian prime minister and demanding that the country cut fossil-fuel plant emissions. But a few of these are going to involve rearing up on your hind legs and speaking truth to power (and money).

After me, please. I resolve to…

Keep recycling. Rhode Island’s recycling program came about as a side-effect of a defeated proposal to build an enormous trash incinerator at Quonset Point in the late 1980s. While it hasn’t turned the world on its head, the resulting boost in recycling has held steady. The economics still make it a hopefully zero-sum proposition, but it is indeed getting more and more recycled products in play and keeping them out of the state landfill.

Start composting. This is for the truly committed and usually non-city dwellers. It’s a hell of a lot easier to build a little chicken wire enclosure in your backyard for food scraps and leaves than it is in the den of your four-room apartment (ecoEarth, a commercial venture of ecoRI News, does serve urban residents in Providence and Pawtucket). You will feel better for your contribution to a local farmer if you’re in town, and if you’re not, your tomatoes will be bigger and better when you add former parts of your meals to the soil.

Don’t waste water. An official at the United Nations said just before the millennium, “The wars of the 21^st century will be over water.” True. Heads of anyone living in Africa or Asia would explode if you told them we use drinkable water to spray lawns or wash our driveways in the ‘burbs. Come to think of it, that mind-blower might happen to more than a few Californians in 2016. Years ago, I laughed at the idea of using a rain barrel, thinking it would join backpacks and Birkenstocks as icons of the tree-hugger brigade.

A few years later, truth be told, when the water rates leaped like a salmon going upstream, that water barrel turned out to take care of my garden and wash my car cost-free, thank you very much. As the Left Coast has found out, water can indeed run out. And for those bottom-line businesspeople who could care less about enviro issues, North Kingstown recently had to cancel a planned economic development project on Post Road because they didn’t have enough water to handle serving new business offices and still guarantee enough for firefighting. Didn’t see that one coming, did you, gang?

Avoid littering. This goes without saying. Littering is the height of ignorance and rudeness, and a sign of utter disrespect. But coastal clean-up inventories and new state and municipal no-smoking beach ordinances demonstrate there are still morons out there who do something as offensive as leaving their butts in the sand while their asses are in the water. As a guilty smoker trying to quit, I have never left a cigarette filter on a beach (or anywhere else for that matter), and there is nothing easier to just shove in your pocket and dispose of later.

Don’t drive so much, unless it’s your only option. Ride a bike, carpool or drive them Reeboks to wherever you’re going whenever possible. The car emissions aren’t helping to slow climate change (but please don’t start talking about your “carbon footprint;” it’s pedantic and just plain annoying) and traffic congestion is miserable for everyone. And you are right: We need a hell of a lot better public transit system if we are going to convince that SUV to stay in the garage.

Stand up and be counted. (This is for the serious players only, if you want to be one of them.) Plastics are the scourge of our oceans and Narragansett Bay. Yes, most think it is the idiots who throw away their plastic water and soda bottles and fast food wrappers and let them drift out to sea. But the point of attack should be the manufacturers and corporations who are in love with plastic packaging for fast food, merchandise in big box stores (some use increased packaging just to make shoplifting harder) and plastic shopping bags. Production of plastic has to be reduced at the source, and paid for by those who employ it in their final products. Do you really need that burger both wrapped and put in a plastic box? Do you really need those batteries encased in a large shell of plastic? The problem with the push to reduce plastic in merchandising whatever product, and have the producer pay for it, is that you are going up against corporations with enough money to make a Saudi prince sob. But why not at least try to get a punch in now and then?

Finally, and most important to you as a Rhode Islander, is the underfunding by the state of  two agencies that have the biggest impact on protecting The Ocean State’s environment and, in particular, Narragansett Bay. They are the Department of Environmental Management and the Coastal Resources Management Council. Both the DEM and CRMC have had their capacity to create and enforce environmental regulations undercut by reductions in budget and staff. The guilty parties are the General Assembly and governor’s office for letting that happen – an insidious way of assuring the agencies can’t function properly, the equivalent of cutting a police department’s budget so there are only 10 cops on the beat instead of 20, and wondering why the crime rate is up. The heads of DEM and CRMC, Janet Coit and Grover Fugate respectively, are excellent, smart people who know just what is going on, but are essentially powerless to stop it: If they scream and complain about what is a well-known fact of their everyday lives, they … will … be … fired. So it is up to the public to start lighting the torches and storming Smith Hill on the agencies’ behalf.  Save the Bay is currently in the vanguard of this charge, putting an appeal and petition online where you can add your voice to urging Governor Raimondo, House Speaker Mattiello and Senate President Paiva-Weed to fund enforcement now. It can be accessed at: http://www.savebay.org/enforcethelaw. Get up, stand up.

No one said any of this would be easy.  Have a Happy New Year.

Contributing writer Chip Young is senior fellow at the University of Rhode Island Coastal Institute and president of the board at EcoRI.