Fostering a Sense of Sustainability in our Children: A Tribute to Tu b'Shevat

I can remember a babysitting job I took in my early college days for a family living next door to my college campus. They were a lovely young family in a small suburban home with a comparatively huge edible garden in their yard. They had a preschool aged son and twin one year old boys at the time. They ate a vegan diet, cloth diapered, primarily cycled for transportation and I truly felt at ease in their home. Until the first massive spill occurred. I asked the preschool aged child where the paper towels were. He did not even know what paper  towels were. After some time describing the mysterious product of a towel you use only once and then throw away, he directed me to a drawer of rags for cleaning. Who knew?

Fast forward a few more years, and you could find a slightly older quite idealistic version of me perusing the aisles of locally owned co-ops, thrift stores and farmer's markets on my very limited budget and toting my most recent library checkout, Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car and Found Love in 366 Days by Vanessa Farquharson in a reusable canvas bag. I was going to take the plunge. I was going to live a sustainable lifestyle on a barely sustainable college student budget. I was going to compost in a coffee can. I was going to go paperless. I was going to go green. I was going to have the sinus infection of a lifetime and only some makeshift snot rags from an old bed sheet on hand. And a washer and dryer that required quarters to operate. In another building. Around the block. Not my most sustainable sustainability plan ever...

You know you might be a bit crunchy when you ask
for a compost pail for Mother's Day...

I caved. I bought a box of tissues. Not even recycled, unbleached tissues. I bought Puffs Plus with Lotion. A nose in need deserves Puffs indeed. And I accepted that my version of living a sustainable life needed, like all other areas of my life, to be balanced. This meant that at different points in my life, I focused on different ways of living with less waste. Sometimes that meant shopping secondhand or using cloth napkins or bringing my own bags to the supermarket. Sometimes that meant purging nearly all my worldly possessions to thrift stores, emergency service agencies and individuals in need and moving cross country with only 15 boxes, 3 carry-ons and bicycle I had used as my sole method of transportation for the last 9 years. But not all of this was because I love the trees. Much of it was because I was a college student on a fixed budget living on her own 3000 miles away from any family who needed to get around and didn't drive. I also didn't always live with "less." My affinity toward thrift store shopping and many other creative interests led me to acquire quite a lot and the act of purging nearly all of it was actually quite challenging and cathartic at the same time.

Life stages shift and focuses shift along with them. I got married and moved again and early on in our marriage when I was newly pregnant with S and super tired, I can remember lying in bed wistfully daydreaming of my former thrift store shopping days and sandals with socks and bicycle treks to farmers' markets with canvas totes in tow. I was so nostalgic for these days and so hormonal that my husband, not really knowing what else to do, took me to a local secondhand shop and we bought about 5 mismatched cloth napkins. He must have thought I was absolutely insane, but these napkins brought me so much joy! They were a piece of me I had left behind, seemingly inconsequential, but a piece of me, nonetheless. And I knew at that point, though not necessarily in what context, that fostering a sense of sustainability in our own growing family was something I valued.

The boys carry snacks to school or outings in reusable canvas pouches they decorated or simple sewn drawstring bags I made from scraps of a favorite fabric.

We buy most of our cloth napkins secondhand. When
they get too stained and worn out, I don't feel badly finally
sending them on their way; they've lived a full life! Once
in a great while, I'll splurge on a unique one from a gift
shop as a souvenir from a family trip. We usually each use one
a day and then it gets tossed in a wash. A far cry from the endless
number of paper napkins we used to go through here...

At that time, I had images of cloth diapering among other ideals that didn't play out. As I had already discovered, living a sustainable lifestyle also means living in balance with what is practical for your family at the time. Over the last five years, we've ditched paper napkins in favor of cloth ones. We have paper towels (and we swing for the more expensive ones because you can use less at a time). We also have an assortment of cloth towels and rags. I travel with disposable wipes and diapers but also with an old makeup bag filled with some handmade cloths and a gentle soap spray I made from diluted castile soap for wiping everything from dirty hands to peanut butter covered faces on the go. S brings his snack to school in reusable bags, carries a hand knit napkin in his lunch and reusable containers and flatware for the most part. With two kids, we do dishes a load of laundry daily anyway. But we were spending exorbitant amounts on paper and plastic products before introducing the reusable options. I wear socks with my sandals again because how else will people ever see my really cool socks? We joined a CSA and in the warmer months we get a box of locally grown produce biweekly. In the winter, we realized we weren't using it as much and reduced our subscription to every three weeks. We have a sedan and a minivan. I have a tiny compost pail under the sink for some of our waste but our trash can is about 4 times that size and we empty it daily. We don't have curbside recycling here, but we do have some bins at a local grocery store and, um, two bags full of items I have yet to take there. Nonetheless, the kids love to scrounge through it for treasures and also help to contribute to it.

I remember being quite disheartened to find out years ago when my husband was working at a reputable liberal arts college that both the recycling and garbage bins in his office were emptied each morning into the same plastic trash bag by campus staff. I don't fool myself into believing that the small things we do in our home or daily lives make such a huge and enormous difference in the grand disposable scheme of things. But I do value modeling and imparting a mentality of balanced and practical sustainability for my children.

My students were fascinated by this "magic" tree
made from recycled newspaper!

I also remember early in my teaching career how frustrated I felt when the students would mistreat materials and supplies. Caps left off markers were perhaps one of my greatest pet peeves. I even did the classic old school teacher move of "revoking their marker privileges" until they could demonstrate care and responsibility for their materials and earn the privilege of coloring with markers back! Now I cringe at this display of arrogance. Fast forward to my own children, and I still kind of initially balk when one of them breaks a toy or damages something and S will respond with "let's get another one at the store." I cringe a little when I scrape large quantities of the food they were previously starving for into the trash can. I recoil a little when the faucet is left running in the bathroom sink. Don't these kids have any reverence for our planet and our shared responsibility in caring for it? Don't they have any idea that toys cost money? Or that the mini cucumber I'm throwing away was truly a miracle that emerged from one tiny seed and a comparatively enormous amount of labor, toil and love? And the answer to those questions is no. They don't know that. They are 21 months and 4 years old and up until now, everything has just shown up here. Their toys, their dinner, their markers and even the bathroom sink. They don't see my husband in his office each day and what he does to earn the money that pays the bills. They just see him leave in the morning and come home at night. They don't see the farmers in the fields or the truck drivers delivering produce to the stores or the night shift workers stocking the shelves. We just go to Walmart and pick what we want to buy and pay for it. They don't see the water cycle and the affect it has on everything from the fish in the sea to the cucumber on their dinner plate. They just see that when the faucet is turned on, the water comes out and if you add enough soap, it makes a lot of bubbles. And bubbles are fun.

I keep a stock of lower quality washcloths (the kind you buy in a huge pack at Walmart) for wiping spills, dirty hands, dirty faces, messy art projects, household cleaning, wiping tabletops and counter tops and whatever other needs may arise. A large stack is ready in our kitchen above the laundry machines and a smaller stack is kept in a drawer where the boys can access them as needed to clean up their own spills and messes. S is able to reach to put them in the laundry area when he's done. Once they get particularly worn or stained, they get downgraded to rag status or cut and re-purposed for smaller rags/wipes. 

So years ago, after a marker cap rampage right around the time of Tu b'Shevat, I decided to use the holiday as a backdrop for teaching about sustainability and being resourceful rather than wasteful. I bought a recycling bin for my classroom and children came to school with dumbfounded parents who wanted to know why they were dumpster diving for contributions. We would have recycled art days here and there throughout the year when it was time to empty the recycling. (I can imagine those parents were equally dumbfounded when the plastic apple container from Costco came back home covered in tape, google eyes and pipe cleaners.) And I involve my own children in recycling, reusing, growing some of our own food and picking out cloth napkins at the thrift store. They can reach a tissue for their nose and they can reach a rag from the drawer. We shop for most of our groceries at Walmart, but we also take the boys to the thrift store when we go or the farmer's market, food co-op and garden center in season.

As we play with our collection of wooden loose parts, we talk about the gifts we get from trees--and also that these gifts are given to the detriment and demise of that tree. It's not that I want my children (or my students) to feel guilty using a sheet of paper or building with wooden blocks. It's that I want them to experience the true joy of gratitude in it and the sense of wonder that a pencil, a tissue, a piece of paper and a cardboard tube all came from a tree. And so did the door on our pantry and the popsicle stick on our dessert and the apple in our lunchbox, not to mention the great place for climbing, the special spot for sitting in the shade and the fresh sweet air we breathe on our Shabbos afternoon walk.

I sew and knit rags and towels in a variety of sizes for a variety of uses. Flannel and terrycloth backed "wipes" are perfect for traveling in my purse and are a great way to re-purpose bits of worn out towels, pajamas, baby blankets and such that are sentimental or not entirely ready to be tossed out altogether. S brings a knit napkin in his lunch box each day and even though I know for a fact he is so eco-friendly he only uses his shirt sleeve, I like to think that this little bit of handmade Mommy love reminds him of home while he eats his lunch. It's also nice to have small, quick projects for working on the go.

And so this is not a post preaching that you should don a pair of printed socks and sandals (but you can if you want to, I won't judge). I won't tell anyone to adopt any of the habits I have or to ditch any others that you may have. I really do think it is about balance and about what works for your family at the time (knowing that these things change through the seasons and years). If some of these do resonate, go for it! If none of them do, keep scrolling! I am not going to unplug my fridge. I'm not going to sell our cars. I am not even going to ditch the tissues ever again because, um, going green just can't be that green in my world. And whether the recycled items I toss in the bins (if I ever actually do make it there) go into a trash bag or to the recycling center, I don't know. But I do know that a connection is made for my children when they help to sort them or even when they pull a cardboard tube from the stash to turn into a telescope. I know that bit by bit, they learn through my own modeling and their participating in this endeavor that the joy they have in blowing through a paper towel tube trumpet is from the same place as the joy they have when climbing the low, gnarly branches of the 100 year old mulberry tree at our botanical garden center. They will connect, too, the joy they feel in biting into a juicy strawberry with the joy they feel at seeing that first red berry emerge on their own strawberry plant in our yard.

It's the same joy I felt with those thrifted mismatched cloth napkins five years ago. The joy of living in a way that exudes the gratitude I feel for this immense level of interconnection. That everything from the bracha (blessing) I make on a glass of water to the way I wipe a spill that subsequently happens is all an opportunity to tap into that joy and feel as rooted as a 100 year old mulberry tree. So if you happen to see a minivan drive by with a bin of reusable grocery totes and spilled recyclables "on their way to the recycling bins" rolling around in the back, it might be me. If it also happens to be parked across no fewer than 3 spots about 7 miles away from any other cars in the lot and there's someone rather shadily walking toward the grocery store pushing a cart with two cuties and donning a pair of bumblebee knee socks and some sandals in January, it's definitely me.

Happy Playing!