Reflecting As I Walk Through the Forest

All alone I begin the one hour hike through the forest. My brain is racing. Today I'm thinking about all the chemicals that people flush down their toilets. In Georgia, most people live on septic tanks, so hundreds of chemicals go straight into the ground. Even if you are on a sewer system, the filters don't catch everything. All the Prozac and Zoloft goes straight into the water supply, which will maybe help my depression.

I hold up simple hiking objects in my hand. My water bottle, flashlight, poncho, and side bag. All of these products took a massive industry to produce, and during this process more chemicals and waste products were released into the atmosphere.

Gosh, and not to mention if you buy a car. Cars are nasty, environment-destroying machines, yet we love them. They get people to the forest so that they can hike on the trail and throw their water bottles on the ground.

I pick them up. I risk my safety pulling trash out of the creek. Since I got into this weird funk and decided to retreat into the woods, my hiking companion and I have taken out many bags of trash.

We also recycle everything. The plastic and tin containers that hold pet food smell awful. So, I let them soak in water for a day to clean them out. Then I dry them and place them in the recycling bin. It's like some sort of religious ritual. All the glass, paper, cardboard, tin, and plastic we use is carefully sorted and placed in the container. But I still live with guilt. Even if I consume little and recycling everything I still do more damage to the Earth than an Ethiopian living in a hut. Then I have to think of the futility of it all because any good that I do is offset when I just into my car and drive to the grocery store. It's also offset by the human population explosion, which is adding people to our planet by the BILLIONS.

As if that's not enough, I worry about all the human-made chemicals that are being released daily into our soil, water, and air. I guarantee you that every one of these chemicals was created to make our lives better in some way, but instead they are slowly killing us and future generations. We are turning our home planet into a giant toxic waste dump. Plus, all these chemicals mix together in ways we don't understand yet. Every time I spit out my toothpaste and it goes down the sink, I'm thinking about what it's doing to the groundwater. Yeah, toothpaste is mainly made out of baking soda paste, which seems harmless, but if you read the ingredients you can't even pronounce the names of all the chemicals. Toothpaste contains abrasives, whiteners, silica, phosphates. God help you if you actually swallow the shit. Yes, every day, I'm spitting it into my septic tank.

The Last Idealist

I realize that I'm among the few people who worry about chemical pollution. Most people give it little thought until they have a baby born with seven legs, or they realize they are being poisoned by the chemical plant up the street. But don't worry because when you get sick the United States has a massive, dysfunctional, money-grubbing healthcare system that will continue to drag you through hell as they shake down your insurance company. And your insurance company will use this as a pretext to raise rates, and more healthy people will get sick, and a vicious circle will continue. Yeah, I actually worry about things like this. As I've said many times, I'm way too idealistic for this life, so I just prefer to walk in the forest.