What's Next?
By Christopher Swain
We face with millions of environmental
problems, but they all share the same root cause: every
environmental problem is the result of a choice that we have made.
The decisions we make about where we live,
how we travel, what we eat, what we wear, what we buy, and what we throw away, define the
communities and fuel the industries that shape our world.
If we hope to live in a healthier world, we
need to look at effects of our choices that we make every day. Every choice we make sets off a
chain of potentially harmful events that affects not just the quality of of air, land and water, but our health as well.
Together we have made something of a mess
of our little water planet. And most every environmental organization
out there says they know how to clean things up. Yet too often, this
simply means that unsuspecting citizens are bombarded with
environmental to-do lists that leave us more overwhelmed than
empowered, more depressed than inspired.
While it would be great if we could all
make all of our decisions with the environment in mind, that can be a
tall order at the end of a long, tiring day.
I would like to help make the world a
healthier place for all of us to live. And I imagine that you would as
well. I'll bet you don't need to hear much more about how the choices
you have made have messed up the world. You KNOW that. I suspect that
you just need to find something simple to do to help, and then figure
out how to fit it into your busy life.
Me, too.
As an open-water swimmer,
I can see first hand the effects that man-made toxic materials,
chemicals, and wastes are having on the planet and the life it
sustains.
As a Dad, I know that my daughters are on
track to inherit a world oozing with man-made toxics. But it is simply
too overwhelming for me to try to solve such a huge problem all at
once. As much as it bugs me--my inner 18 year-old still wonders whether
I can singlehandedly clean up the world--I know I have to focus my
energies. I pick out part of the larger mess, and then start shoveling.
A couple of years ago, I started noticing
that some of the most troubling toxics I stroked through on my
swims--nasty stuff like mercury, lead, PCBs, and brominated fire
retardants--were accumulating not just in the fatty tissues of the fish
and marine mammals I sought to protect, but in my own body as well.
Yet, when I made presentations to schoolchildren, I struggled to find a
way to "teach" about these toxics, because, unlike trash, things like
mercury and lead weren't visible to kids when they went down to the
banks of their local rivers. It was very difficult to get children--or
even adults--to relate to toxic agents that they could not see--however
dangerous they might be.
So I started doing a bit of research.
Where,
I wondered, do we encounter bundles of man-made toxics during a typical
day? Where, in our everyday lives, do we brush up against the same
heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and hazardous compounds that I swim
through, but still hope to protect my daughters from?
It came as
a bit of a surprise to me to learn that the closest I came to nasties
like mercury, lead, and brominated fire retardants during a typical
days, was when I used my laptop computer, talked on my cell phone, or
collapsed in front of the TV after getting the kids to sleep. If my
Sanyo cell phone, my MAC iBook, and or my Sony TV were ever consigned
to a landfill, incinerated, or dumped on a third world scrap heap, they
would release a potent cocktail of toxics into the environment, toxics
that would harm my air, my land, my water, and my fellow human beings.
They would become "e-waste", leaving behind a troubling toxic legacy not just for my daughters, but for future generations.
At first I was disturbed by the knowledge that I was, once again, part of the problem.
And then I realized two things.
First,
educating people about man-made toxics had just gotten a lot easier:
everybody can relate to a cell phone, a computer, or a TV (and if
enough people learned about the e-waste problem, then passing producer
responsibility laws or environmentally responsible mining acts would be
a lot easier).
Second, whatever legislation might be enacted,
there was a mountain of toxic e-waste that needed cleaning up. Here,
finally, was something I could do to help clean up my world: I could
make sure that my used electronics enjoyed a planet-friendly future,
and I could help other people to do the same.
Somehow, within days, I was telling people that I wanted to find a way to ethically recycle one billion pounds of electronic waste.
Close friends politely suggested that I might need a little help.
I agreed.
So after months of driving my friends and family nuts, I decided I needed to search for more people who might lend me a hand.
I designed an expedition to find them.
I even gave my expedition a name: the TOXTOURTM.
Wanna ride along?
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