So apparently, April 22 is Earth Day. Most of us don’t care about Earth Day, because we don’t get off of work. (Though this year it’s Shabbos.) If you want to promote awareness of something, you should really let people stay home from work. That way, people are talking about it.
“Why are you home?”
“Earth Day.”
“Oh. I thought that was Rosh Hashanah.”
And before you say, “Another Holiday?!” I should tell you that Earth Day isn’t the kind of holiday where you eat a huge seudah and take a nap. Earth Day is the kind of holiday where you focus on cleaning the planet. And before you say, “Again? I just cleaned my house!” I should tell you that I can’t help you there. When you went through your garbage before Pesach, did you take each item apart and put everything in the correct recycling bins?
“No, I want to throw out my garbage; I don’t want to file it!”
The point of Earth Day is to raise awareness of environmental issues. So here goes: There are environmental issues. The environment is everywhere. It’s behind you right now. Don’t look; you’ll spook it. And regardless of what any one person believes about the extent to which we’re wrecking our planet, it’s going to get pretty gross if some of us don’t do something.
Hence Earth Day—a day to clean roadways and plant trees and not shower and harass elected officials. Preferably in that order.
Being green is not a new thing. Your father has always been green, telling you to turn off lights when you leave a room even though you clearly intended to come back to that room eventually, and you almost always, when you were in the room, needed the light on. When have you ever gone into the pantry, for example, and said, “I sure wish the light was off in here”? He also tried to encourage you to walk everywhere.
So we should all think about doing something to conserve:
When possible, dry your hands on your pants. You can also blow your nose on your laundry.
If you spill something on the floor and you’re not wearing shoes, wipe it with your sock. If you’ve spilled an entire container of something, get the rest of your family to use their socks as well. Unless it’s pickle juice.
Experts recommend that you keep your freezer full, to the point where, every time you open the door, everything falls out, and you spend 10 minutes dodging frozen items as you simultaneously reach down to grab them and try to keep the freezer from closing on your head. That uses less power.
If you use cloth diapers instead of disposables, you’ll have trained your kids by the age of two weeks.
Never let your father know how long you leave the shower running before you finally decide to get in.
Sure, some of these methods are unconventional. But not all the conventional methods are entirely thought through.
For example, people say we should use less water. So I drink soda. That’s only like 25 percent water, right? The other 75 percent is sugar. But on the other hand, they say we should drink eight cups of water a day, which sounds true, because there’s probably one magic number that applies to everybody in the world regardless of size.
One big tip that every article seems to say is to turn off the water while brushing your teeth. Who keeps the water running while they brush their teeth?
“Just by turning off the tap while brushing,” one article says, “you can save more than 200 gallons of water per month.”
Wow, you are grossly overestimating how much I brush my teeth.
They also say we should take shorter showers. Regardless of size. They say that an average shower uses up to 50 gallons of water. A typical family in Africa uses a tenth of that for an entire day, including laundry, drinking water and running the tap while they brush their teeth.
We’re also supposed to drive less. They say we should walk everywhere, because if we don’t, the world is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to have to walk everywhere.
So it’s a question of walking everywhere today or tomorrow? I’d rather do it tomorrow, then. No offense, but I push off all my exercise like that. And if we’re at a point where everyone’s walking, people wouldn’t roll their eyes when you say you’re late to work because you walked. Also, we could take the highways.
They also say to not carry extra things in your car, because that uses gas. But then they say to carpool. The way a carpool works is that one day you drive the kids to school, and the next day the other person asks if you can take their day. Make sure to spend 10 minutes honking in the morning with your motor running while your neighbor’s kid looks for his shoe, which he arguably doesn’t need because you’re driving him to school.
Which brings us to bottled water, which apparently is bad for the environment, because, as scientists recently discovered, bottles are made from plastic. And plastic is made from oil. And we toss millions of bottles per year. Why on earth are we drinking eight cups a day?
By Mordechai Schmutter
Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, The Jewish Press and Aish.com, among others. He also has five books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].
