I found this rant on Facebook, and it kind of made me think a bit more about the Terrestrians. The rant is essentially about how, back in the good old days, people didn’t have an official green movement, but in a lot of ways they still performed ‘green’ actions. They did it for different reasons, mostly about saving money. But they reused milk bottles, they air-dried the laundry, they had far fewer appliances and devices, used push mowers, and had never even heard of disposable diapers or bottled water.
Okay, yeah, I know. Whoever wrote this takes a really rose-coloured-glasses view of the past. It wasn’t as if there was no such thing as waste back in the 50s. It was completely legal to dump chemicals and sewage in waterways, there were not too controls on industry (except for what the company’s financial decisions imposed), and littering was a common public practice. In a way, this is kind of the opposite what I wrote about yesterday: this writer is seeing perfect environmental conservation where there really wasn’t any, while John Vaillant was pointing out environmental waste and profit motives where they’re usually invisible.
But for me, it comes back to the Terrestrians, who are trying to live sustainably so their goddess won’t destroy them. Maybe they don’t have to be totally perfect to escape destruction. After all, they need to live somewhere, they need clothes, they need food. Everything has some impact on the planet. I think their goal must be to minimize their impact. They avoid things like plastics and chemicals, heavy industrial products, and anything with a larger-than-average carbon footprint, like cars or hydroelectricity. They make a lot of little choices that help them to fit into the environment without altering it beyond all recognition, the way the rest of us have done for generations.
Kind of noble, when you think about it that way. But kind of strange. I’m not sure what to think about the whole thing.
Mallory Saenger
