I drive on an interstate highway several days each week, and have been doing that for four years.  The picture above is what’s left of a plastic grocery bag that got caught up in a tree.  It has disintegrated some, and gotten brittle and is now unrecognizable as a bag.  My reason for pointing it out is that it has now been hanging there for four years. I noticed it right after I started traveling that way and watched to see what would happen to it.

We know that plastic lasts, well, pretty much forever.  This is the thinnest kind of plastic, the least durable plastic I can think of , and in the snow and ice and heat of summer, it is still plastic hanging in a tree four years later.  I’ve often times thought about it as I drove by, checked on it, wondering….how long will it last?  Recently I thought it was gone and then I spotted it again, and it inspired me to write the story of it, plastic hanging in a tree.

This is not to show that I’m a little obsessive about things, cos I’m not;  its to show that we need to find more ways to treasure our Earth and take care of her.  Our society, and most of the societies on Earth as best I can tell, live like our resources will last forever.  Plastic bags might last forever, but our resources will eventually run out.  So will the spaces that we have dedicated for throwing things away: land fills, barges in the ocean, piles of stuff lying around wherever.

Here’s a Wikipedia article about recycling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling

We can all do more things to treasure our Earth. We can recycle, as many different products as possible: paper, cardboard,  plastic, metal, glass.  We can use cleaning cloths made of fabric instead of paper, and wash them and reuse them.  We can take scrap metal to dealers who buy it instead of throwing it in a landfill.  If we garden, we can compost kitchen scraps and save things from going to a landfill and make good natural fertilizer.

Can you think of a way to treasure your Earth that you were not already doing? Each time I pass this piece of plastic, I try to think of another way to take care of our home which is lent to us, not given, and remember that we are guests here.  Just a thought……………..