Folks do ask, “Patriciafaye, why is it at your age of 74 are you devoting more that 40 hours a week to the projects of Zero Waste?” It’s not a short answer. “Do you have an hour? Can we have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine?” I was born and raised in very rural Mississippi. We had pigs. They ate all our food scraps. Mama had a burn pile and burned the trash. There wasn’t very much. She kept a burlap bag on the back porch where she collected tin cans. When it was almost full-probably once a year- she’d drag it down into the back pasture where there were blackberry vines and a couple of old wrecked pickups. There she’d dump the cans and we’d half fill the bag with blackberries. I reckon the remnants of those cans and pickups are still there. I’m not advocating for dumping tin cans or pickup trucks. That’s just the way she did it.
The recycling conversation didn’t make it’s way into my world until the late 70″s. I’d hiked to the top of a mountain in Arizona with a few friends. We’d each hiked with a plastic bottle of water in hand. When we got back down and were approaching our vehicle my friend noticed that I didn’t have my water bottle.
I’d finished the water and had left the bottle on the mountain. It was an hour climb back up the mountain. My friends, clearly more aware and responsible that I, insisted I go back for the bottle.
That experience left its imprint.
In 1978 I participated in the est training-the forerunner of The Landmark Forum. I ultimately did the entire curriculum and spent a decade working on staff as a seminar leader and fundraiser. That work impacts my life on a daily basis even now! I worked along side of a woman who is still a strong presence in my life. Her name is Lynne Twist. She created a technology of raising money that I’ve copied over the years. It’s called “Fundraising from the Heart”. She also wrote a book called THE SOUL OF MONEY.
About 20 years ago she and her husband Bill and their friend John Perkins took a trip to Ecuador and spent time with the Achuar Tribe in the rainforest. These Indigenous Elders told them that if the “Modern North” did not change their ways of consumerism and aquisition and begin to focus on the healing of The natural world we as a human family would be doomed! Out of these conversations Lynne, Bill and John founded The Pachamama Alliance. “Pachamama is a Quecha Indian word meaning “mother earth”. The work within Ecuador, Peru, and throughout the world thrives today. Ecuador voted in a new constitution giving “Rights to Nature” the first country in the world to do so. Lynne created the “Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream” symposium which I got trained to facilitate in 2010.
It was there in Seattle in that 3-day training that I woke up to Global Warming. There were probably 50 of us in the room together immersing ourselves in the painful evidence of what was at that time already lost…….old growth forests, sea ice, hundreds of species of mammals, fish, birds, pristine rivers and mountaintops, our thriving oceans…….and people…throw-away people…mass incarcerations, environmental injustices……3 roots of the same tree- environmental sustainability, social justice, and spiritual fulfillment. Those were the goals of the symposium- “To create a human presence bringing forth those 3 things. We watched hours of video clips of the icecaps melting-polar bears stranded on pieces of ice…….large majestic mammals with their habitats threatened. All brought about by the greed and ignorance of us humans! I cried myself to sleep those 3 nights. Back at home in McMinnville OR sitting on my couch in meditation feeling a spaciousness inside from so much emotional release I asked prayerfully, “What can I do?” For days…….”What can I do?” Finally I heard, “Just Google it”
When I did I was shocked to find that keeping food waste out of landfills could drastically impact the reduction of methane gas! And OMG! Riverbend Landfill is just down the road!
Hang on! More will be revealed.