Conservation Conversation

Remember Your People, and What They Would Say

Let’s have a quick conversation on conservation.

It is fortifying to have been raised by the son of immigrants who was born in the early 30s. My father was almost 40 when I was born, which wasn’t as common in the 70s as it is today. By the time I was 12, I had a dad with an old-school grandpa feeling mixed in. I occasionally felt embarrassed about his old-fashioned frequency, but I was listening to him.

Conservation gets real when you have the trauma of poverty in your cells. My dad was a hardworking achiever who leapt out of his origins. His elementary school classmates were custodians and factory workers, and he was in a world of fundraisers and professional meetings at luxury resorts. Still, when I used to sit on the closed toilet seat to watch my dad wash his face, he would run the water only until the plugged sink was full. He could re-use the same wad of damp paper towels by the sink for a weekend. He taught me to clean four rooms with the same soapy bucket. He once yelled at me as a teenager for mindlessly testing if a pen still had ink on a unique, high quality stationery envelope. I had wasted it by tattooing big loopy and inky circles on it. I told him he was being mean, but if one of my kids did that today I would reprimand with a sharp edge too.

He told brief stories about growing up as the youngest boy in a family with six children, in the form of one-liners. If you didn’t get ‘em, he didn’t care. He waited on you to figure it out. Lines like “by the time I got the tub to myself, the water was cold and black with dirt” or “by the time I got the school shoes they had holes in the bottom of them”. He laughed about a teacher at school saying “I don’t recognize your face, but I recognize the clothes”.

These one-liners rang out through the years like good poetry. They took shape and made me understand conservation. Use, re-use. It’s fine, it’ll work. Common sense on a budget made sense. Now I have a husband who buys old things because he can fix anything.

By adulthood, I would find deep gratitude to have had new Esprit outfits for the plane ride to a vacation as a teenager, and other things my dad never had. I remembered that he inscribed the inside cover of hardcover books as gifts for us, but everything he read was from the library. I’ve written about him before- this time last year, I wrote the piece below. Maybe he nudges me from heaven to write about him at this time of year because it is around my mom’s birthday and he’s saying hi.

Conspicuous Consumption

My dad’s habits are not only in my DNA but in my emotional and mental constitution. Billionaires who scare the crap out of decent, hardworking, modest citizens about rising sea levels, while running fridges and mini-fridges all over their oceanfront properties, mean nothing to me. I know how much they want to kill off the wisdom of my father’s generation, alive inside me. I know how much they want me to look away from the children who are digging and mining cobalt for electric cars in conditions that are far, far worse than an old truck rambling out of our driveway. My DNA searches for hypocrisy. It’s how I was made. I will never trust conspicuous consumers telling me to conserve because my father didn’t. In fact his suspicion of conspicuous consumption was regularly celebrated. He was proud of it.

None of those billionaires telling people to get rid of their gas stove and lease an electric vehicle in this wrecking ball of an economy have ever used the same wad of paper towels for a weekend. They don’t wipe their own kitchen counter and they never will. None of those “philanthropists” using the word “philanthropy” as a stand-in for money laundering care about God and nature. They are walking hot air, mouthpieces for agenda’s hollow rhetoric.

Carbon is life. Common sense is critical. Individualism is the whole-food prevention of malignant tumors of “climate crisis” money-laundering schemes, pushed by NGOs that ignore (and smear) scientists who conclude there is no climate crisis. How do NGOs that “serve” the climate crisis go from zero to over a million overnight? They’re funded baby, just like the scientists who parrot the billionaires. They’ve been bought, and they fall in line. I prefer to ignore the conspicuous consumers touting a climate crisis. Even if one is a “much loved” former president, (depending on whether you watch Tucker Carlson’s episodes on X or not). I’d rather hear from scientists who aren’t purchased, and just report back from work.

For instance, the 1609 scientists that signed this. Read it yourself, here.

Awake yet? It’s a uniparty, and a unicrisis. Reserve your rejection for those in “power” and you may find the power really does remain with outspoken citizens in enlightening conversation, who know what they have here in this great country.