Throw away culture

In my on-going attempt to revive my recently broken right arm to its previous abilities and strength, I have been stretching my wrist several times a day, and doing simple weight training and squeezing exercises. The other day I was in a sports store getting new soccer boots for Aidan (sigh... three pairs in two years!), when I saw a set of Pilates plastic balls, each of which was filled with differently weighted substances. The '3-pound' ball was just the right weight for rotating my wrist effectively. When the ball was scanned at the check-out with the boots, something inside me reacted. "Wait!", I said. "Perhaps not the ball."









My first reaction was against buying a piece of plastic filled with, who knows, dirt, being sold for $17.95 before tax. And then I began to think more about it. I realized that I was surrounded by free stuff that would work just as well as the Pilates ball. Later that day, Denise and I went for a walk by the river, and I picked up a palm-sized rock along the shore. Not only were there thousands to choose from, the one I chose was the perfect weight, smooth like the Pilates ball, and free. Furthermore, when I am done with it I will simply put it back beside the river.

I'm glad I did not buy the Pilates ball. I was drawn initially to it because, well, if I am really committed to getting better, then I should not worry so much about spending money. However, even if the Pilates ball had been free, it would not have been free. The oil used to make the plastic would have required refinement at a factory, and whatever it was that gave the ball its weight probably had to be mined from somewhere. Once the raw materials had been collected and transported to a factory, people working in toxic conditions would have assembled the ball. And then it had to be packaged up, put in a container, then in a boat, and transported across the globe to a port, probably Vancouver. From there it would be transported to a warehouse, from where it was then put on trucks and transported to the sports store in Campbell River. But it does not stop there. When my arm is back to normal, I would no longer need the ball, and would have to discard it somehow. It might end up in a Thrift store, but such stores in Campbell River are getting very careful about what they accept, as they are inundated more and more with stuff that will sell, and have no room for the 'no-hopers'. It could be that I would not even be able to give it away, so that it would end up in our local land-fill. Our land-fill is, well, filling up, and soon we are going to have to truck our garbage to the nearest town's land-fill.

If there is one thing above all else that threatens the sustainability of our civilization, it is our collective and obsessive collection of stuff that we probably don't need and then use for just a little while before we discard it. If there are archaeologists in the future who pick through the detritus of our civilization, they are sure to wonder about things like the plastic weighted Pilates ball.