It totally sucks.
A straw, I mean. That’s what it does.
How many do you think you’ve used in your life? How many have a waiter or waitress dropped onto your table, only to throw them out twenty minutes later?
I’ve never much thought about straws, until a couple weeks ago when I read an article about straw pollution. Straw pollution? Yep. Blew my mind.
In the U.S., we use 500 million straws a day! That is enough straw waste to wrap the circumference of the earth 2.5 times or to fill Yankee Stadium over 9 times in a year! Now imagine that magnified by global consumption!
That quote and graphic are from a site called Thelastplasticstraw.org. How could something so little ever amount to so much pollution? It’s hard for me to even picture, but just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean the problem goes away.
In fact, it never goes away. Plastics like straws don’t biodegrade. They just break down into littler and littler pieces. They end up inside animals, and in us! Straws seem like such a handy, innocuous invention. But they literally suck the life right out of our ecosystem.
It makes me wonder what other environmental catastrophes I contribute to and just don’t pay attention to them. Relying on too many fossil fuels. Forgetting to recycle. Throwing used batteries into the trash. Consuming way more than the rest of the world does. I wonder if, when I’m not paying attention, one of those behaviors will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for our planet.
In Genesis, God puts us in charge, giving us dominion over all creatures. That’s quite a responsibility. And here is what God says to the Israelites in Numbers:
‘Do not pollute the land where you are… Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites.’ Numbers 35:33-34
We made this mess. Can we clean it up? Making even a dent in our accumulated mistreatment of Mother Earth seems impossible to achieve. I don’t have any perfect solutions either, although thelastplastricstraw.org has some good suggestions.
Remember, God doesn’t want a messy planet any more than you or I do. The Holy Spirit is here to guide us as we learn to be better stewards. We just need to get started.
Here’s my new motto for tackling pollution:
“Start with the things that totally suck.”
Have a great week,
Mitch
weeklydevotion 