Well. Hell. It's a good thing Someone Else thought up "a day late and a dollar short," because if Someone Else hadn't already done it I'D have to and I wouldn't think of it on the right day.
Like most things, my environmental issues have to do with home and hearth...specifically, with what in the HELL have I done to my kids? We live in a supremely rural setting, my family owns multi-generational land and there are several other families in the area who own the land adjacent/surrounding ours. The land is a major focus in our lives...you mention "party" and my kids think "branch." (For the under-informed: a stream/brook is a small flowing body of water. A river is a large flowing body of water. A branch is in-between.)
When I was little, there was a tree next to the creek (not to be confused with the branch) that runs across the road. And on a broken branch on this tree was an empty coke bottle. And whenever you went down there, you filled that empty coke bottle with cold water from the creek and drank until your belly jostled.
Then, about 30 years ago, the Lauderdale County Board of Education realized that the new high school it had built didn't have sufficient sewage facilities. So they built a "water treatment plant", and promptly proceeded to dump the sewage from the largest high school in the county into OUR branch. And there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. It was "treated" sewage. And it didn't, according to the people who didn't own the land, hurt anything.
Haven't seen that coke bottle in years.
Point being that ever since then, we've been a little sensitive to fucking up the scenery. If only because: that's MY kid's scenery. And it seems pretty damn ridiculous to have all this great space and land and the trees and wildlife and...just chunk it. Trash it. Look up one day and...Oh! it's gone! Hate that!
We try. Not as hard as we should but my kids have NO CONCEPT of throwing trash out the car window (as verified by the floorboards in my car.) We are slowly working on going lawnless and living with planting areas bordered with river rock we've hauled up from the branch ourselves. (I still use RoundUp because the bermuda is better than I am.) I drive a small, abused, safe car with good gas mileage.
So just how damn depressing is THIS?
Bottom line...we keep pluggin' away. Our branch parties are great, the mud is still mud and if the sound of four-wheelers has replaced the sound of squabbling over crawdads, it's only because our kids have gotten older. You can still put your feet up and drink really cold beer and listen to the waterfall. And maybe one of MY kids will go into politics and save the planet and make a difference. And I'll take ALL the credit.
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