Rubber Bands

Environmental problems are big problems: global warming, extinction, invasive species to name but a few.

We Americans like big solutions to big problems: the Apollo program, the polio vaccine, the Manhattan Project.

Maybe there will be a big solution to our environmental mess, but that seems unlikely. These big problems are caused by a myriad of little actions: burning megatons of coal one lump at a time, clearing 10 more Amazon acres to fuel one more fast food joint, a single fire ant that stows away on a ship bound for Mobile, Alabama.

The solutions will likely be a myriad of little actions too, and that is frustrating.

Faced with the “inconvenient truths” designed to scare us into action, we often instead feel helpless---as though we were called to stop a rampaging elephant with a single rubber band. “How will this one light bulb really make a difference?” we think to ourselves. Why bother?

My rubber bands for creation care (one guy choosing to use CFLs, foregoing car ownership, buying wind power, skipping the Metro paper for a library book, re-using a plastic fork) got me thinking recently: In a world of six billion, does it add up to anything worthwhile? This in turn got me thinking about rubber bands, literally. Circular logic I will confess, but maybe if my physical rubber bands amounted to more than I thought, perhaps my metaphorical ones did too.

So, I gathered up all the rubber bands I could find at home and in my desk at work. I never thought of myself as one who encountered a lot of rubber bands. True, there are the blue ones that hold the asparagus, but I really don’t eat a lot of vegetables. Beyond that I couldn’t really think of how any rubber bands would enter my presence. But present they were. All tolled my personal rubber band haul is about the size of a racquetball. I still won’t stop an elephant single handed, but then again, I don’t have to.

The solutions will likely be a myriad of little actions, and that is . . . empowering---one rubber band at a time.