Reuse

"[My wife and I] chose these low-energy devices and actions simply to avoid waste"
          James Lovelock, propounder of the Gaia Theory

Lovelock wrote those words in The Vanishing Face of Gaia to explain his rejection of environmentalism as an ideology. Climate change, he argues, is almost inevitable; the Earth will become hotter and drier no matter what we do. I think he is right. And I, too, have abandoned the dream of "saving the planet." The planet will save itself, though its solution may not please us.

Avoiding waste is a virtue. I learned it as a seven-year old when my mother, my sister and I spent time in Germany in 1952, living with a sign painter and his wife, the woman who had worked for my grandparents as maid, cook and governess. Like many Germans after World War II, they were poor, lacking even running hot water. To Magdalene, the wife, it was natural to save and reuse. I remember how she salvaged reusables

from packages, which then came wrapped in brown paper bound with string. She would untie the string and then unwrap the paper, without tearing it. The string would be added to a growing ball and the paper folded, to be turned inside out when she herself sent a package.

Packages now rarely come in brown paper and string, but I still keep a ball for string I have used in the garden or around the house. I reuse other things as well. From an aging, cigarette-smoking woman who owned a tropical fish store (mainly as a hobby I think) I learned to add dirty filter bags to the laundry for reuse. And I shop for groceries with reusable bags. Not the flimsy polypropylene variety, but canvas bags that will likely be around long after I am gone.

In what is still largely a throwaway culture, the old adage makes sense: "Waste not, want not."