I’m half Australian and at this moment I’m very proud of it. Here’s why:
www.4ocean.com
A couple of Aussie surfers decided to make a difference. Oh and credit where due, it was a proud American who pointed this out to me with the gift of a bracelet.
I was on the way to Maine from New York City (where my wife Patricia has directed a very fine, very funny production of The Importance of Being Earnest. If you’re up this way www.bagaducetheatre.com for details), and I took in some fast food. The immediate cost to me was about $12 and the medical risks. The cost to the planet in plastic waste absurdly higher and more durable.
So at the micro-level of the individual, this was a piece of political and eco irresponsibility on my part and in many ways almost impossible to avoid given that our global mono-culture is in thrall to plastic.
At the macro-level political nonsense abounds, there are no limits to the appalling absurdities, callous cruelties, preposterous posturing, and general drongo* behaviour … well we all know that, right? After all:
As usual Shakespeare gets there first. On tyrannical political power he says:
“Man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”
As I get older the woo-woo perspective makes more sense. Your basic vote-chasing politico will go so far as to say we ought to be environmentally responsible for “future generations” – Well I’m not too sure that anyone is actually too bothered about these famous “future generations”. But what if …
What if the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Zoroastrians, the neo-pagans, the Platonists, the early Christians, your basic esotericist, quantum physics and Shakespeare (What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?) all have a point, and we the present generation are more intimately connected to future ones than appears in three-dimensional linear space-time thinking?
Somewhere between the micro and the macro there is a remedy, one of many that we will need.
www.4ocean.com
For 20 bucks you can get a bracelet made from recycled materials and 1lb of plastic taken out of the seas.
It’s a start.
- Drongo – Australian vernacular. Dozy f***wit, silly fellow, waste of space etc…
One time I was involved in a World War 1 play. The set was an abstract of sand bags and scaffolding and we were invited to play at the St. Magnus Festival on The Orkney Islands north of the northern tip of Scotland across the Pentland Firth, one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the navigable seas.
The series stars the late amazing Peter Jones, a British national favorite on the long-running BBC radio game Just A Minute, and the original voice-over artist on A Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, given the immortal line, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”