Happy Earth Day!
Welcome to my first Substack post! I’m an artist in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, preoccupied with the health of the environment. I love to use my artistic skills, and the driving engine of climate anxiety, to try to find ways to make the world a better place. I hope you will join me, and share your ideas too! Below is one of my linocuts painted with gouache, Celebrate Earth Day Every Day. You can get an original print here, or support Yampa Valley Sustainability Council by buying a poster here.
Spring is my favorite season. The hint of green on hillsides as the snow recedes, early flowers, and wildlife waking up from hibernation define spring in the Yampa Valley. And mud. We call this mud season, because Steamboat Springs gets a lot of snow, and as it melts everything becomes muddy. Also, snowmelt reveals things that were buried all winter, like dog toys, missing hats, and trash.
Every year to celebrate Earth day, my family picks up trash along the Yampa River or in our neighborhood park. And this year, I hope we will all look at ways to minimize buying single use plastic that will turn into trash. There is nothing like picking up a mucky plastic bag out of matted leaf littler to give you the creeps. With some creative thinking, we can find ways to buy less, reuse items, and pick better packaging. Use cloth grocery bags, reuse salsa or jam containers at home for leftovers, keep and reuse that sturdy tortilla packaging with the zip closure for your lunch. Channel the Great Depression ladies who had to be thrifty, but do it like a super cool visionary, because you are! Then recycle, compost, and finally, throw what you can’t use in the trash.
Plastic is made from fossil fuels that contribute in a huge way to climate change- including extraction, production, and shipping. Finally, that bottle that held the drink you enjoyed for 5 minutes takes about 450 years to break down, along with one zillion of its plastic buddies in the ocean, landfills, and scattered throughout urban and rural spaces around the globe.
It’s disappointing that recycling is not happening the way we were told it would, so using our ability to vote with our wallets, lets support plastic-free or almost-free products. It’s true that paper and glass packaging also have downfalls, but common sense tells me that a small shampoo bar wrapped in paper is much less impactful than a plastic bottle full of liquid shampoo 10 times the size. So here are a few of the favorite products I’ve tried out, and I’d love hear about ones you like. I’m not an expert, and this isn’t a review site, just a chance to start a conversation.
Bumpkins bags, handy for almost anything from sandwiches to pencils.
Ecover Zero Automatic Dishwasher Tablets
Greenlife reusable mesh produce bags
J.R. Liggett’s shampoo bars
Nada Toothbrushes- the brush heads are plastic, but recyclable if you return them.
Tru Earth laundry detergent
So, this Earth Day, I hope you will join me in generating less plastic trash, and we can still smell fresh as a spring flower by using the products above!