For love of Earth Day, and NPR

I love music, new music, indie music, and often toy with the idea that I need to get satellite radio where all the cool new unknown underground bands and artists are playing. Then I listen to NPR in snatches, in the car, and again and always realize how much I love this old-fashioned radio station playing amazing music by amazing musicians, talking about interesting places and people, in its timeless and old fashioned medium. I love that I may encounter cynics in real life but on NPR, I can listen to real people reflect on small things about life in authentic, decent ways.

Today, Earth Day, the local NPR station WAMU’s show Metro Connections talked about saving the native oyster in the Chesapeake Bay, told the story of how competing guitar companies are working with an environmental group to protect trees”, and featured a wonderful commentary from Lynn Peterson Mobley who says “we should fight the feeling that our actions amount to little more than a drop in the bucket.”

Here’s a lovely excerpt:

…I’m the one who’s a nut about recycling. At the same time I’m well aware that my feeble efforts to make less of a personal dent on the world’s resources are such a tiny drop in such a massive bucket that I should be embarrassed by my own efforts, but I’ve decided not to let that bother me.

Years ago in college I read about Kurt Vonnegut who said that we had to learn to live as if our actions were really important in the face of all the evidence that individual efforts mean nothing in the greater scheme of things. He said that we had to live as if we mattered or there wasn’t any point to being alive. Of all the things that I learned, that is what I remember the most and it has infused what I do in daily life.

I try to tell someone if they’ve done a good job, I smile at strangers, I let people into traffic…Life is tough, and its’ so easy to brighten someone’s day. And I really try not to waste stuff. I compost my coffee grounds and potato peels, I leave leftovers in the woods for the foxes to find, I combine trips for errands, little stuff but it means something to me…”

When she dies, she continues, she doesn’t want to leave behind plastic stuff. She says, “Our beliefs may die with us but our stuff lives on forever.”

I’m also a recycling nut often wearied by the thought that all my puny efforts mean nothing except that it makes me feel and sleep better, and I’m embarrassed to ask others to do the same. And it’s heartening to be reminded that puny or not we can choose to make ourselves matter even in everyday little ways.