Question: For the last few years, I have been trying to convince my parents to act like respectable citizens and recycle. To my utter frustration, they refuse. I usually see them for dinner on Sunday and every time I go over, I see aluminum cans and bottles in the trash. They don't compost and their stacks of newspapers just get thrown away. I have endlessly complained to them about this, but nothing ever changes. They don't think it's worth the "hassle." It sounds silly, but I'm almost hurt that they disregard my opinion on this so blatantly. How can I make them see the light?
Answer: There's a quote commonly identified as a native proverb that's currently being used in a television ad campaign promoting the conservation of something or other: "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors," it says, "we borrow it from our children." Exactly, you're probably thinking, and it does make you stop and think. But then, catchy, slogan-ready lines like these are a dime a dozen. In Ecclesiastes, it is written, "A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry." Nothing about returning your bottles afterwards.
My point is that ethics - environmental or any kind - are open to individual points of view, so naturally disagreements will arise betweens parents and their kids. The fact that you are "almost hurt" by their pig-headedness, however, leads me to believe your parents didn't listen to you enough as a kid or were always correcting you at every step, and now you're trying to finally stand up for yourself and your opinions. Nothing wrong with that, but you should admit that this is the case and not use environmentalism as your passive-aggressive way to sort out issues with them. Because it's not going work. The anger will transfer from one newsy, politically-charged topic to the next until one day you'll discover yourself yelling and screaming to defend something you don't really care about at all.
However, if you do some soul searching and discover that, no, environmentalism really is your passion, and you insist on expressing this by converting your parents instead of, say, organizing the planting of 30 million trees in Africa like 2004 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai, then I think you need to start thinking a little outside the whining and the nagging. To help you out, I called up Christy Ferguson, a spokesperson for Greenpeace, to devise an activist intervention, special homestyle edition. Inspired by a Greenpeace action undertaken on a large scale at a Coca-Cola factory in Argentina a couple years ago, Ferguson came up with the perfect action to rain on your parents' wasteful parade. "You could collect a whole bunch of recyclables and slingshot them over the fence when your parents are having a garden party," she suggested. If you want to be a bit more subtle, though, she recommends going into your parents' fridge and stickering items that can be recycled with a label that reminds them of that fact. It'll force them to think about recycling every time they're enjoying a beverage or throwing out an empty container, and eventually, perhaps, their brains will become greenwashed.
Ferguson's best idea, though, picks up on the sentiment expressed in that TV ad: thinking about the next generation. Using the "we borrow [the Earth]from our children" line on your parents would likely be useless given they don't seem to care what their own child thinks, but Ferguson suggests their glacier of stubbornness may melt in the face of their grandchildren. If you can manage to get the first full phrase out of your toddler's mouth to be "Grandma, please recycle," I'll bet you'll have them separating out their tins and plastics in no time.
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