Activist Beth Bond: Climate justice equals cutting waste
The co-founder of Southeast Green brings a new perspective on conservation when she speaks at Cave Spring United Methodist Church.
The co-founder of Southeast Green brings a new perspective on conservation to Cave Spring UMC.
Climate justice isn’t about global warming, climate change or a political agenda.
According to Beth Bond, cofounder of the organization Southeast Green, it’s about cutting waste. As she stood before members of the Cave Spring and Rome communities gathered at the Cave Spring United Methodist Church on Saturday, she explained that this goes beyond recycling water bottles.
In fact, according to her, recycling water bottles should come after using reusable water bottles in day-to-day life. Cutting out waste such as this makes a greater difference in the long run both financially and environmentally.
Bond gave an example of how many plastic drinking straws are wasted because they are not recycled or disposed of properly. She said every day in the United States, 500,000 drinking straws are thrown away and end up either floating in the ocean or sitting in a landfill. According to her, if placed end to end, that amount of straws could wrap around the earth two and half times. Now the point of these examples and lessons are not to make anyone feel like conservation is a hopeless cause. She said it comes back to awareness of how much waste happens in day-to-day life and what can be done to cut it down.
Moving on from smaller scale conservation, she turned the audience’s attention to waste on a larger scale such as oil, food and energy production. She said regardless of your political views, waste takes place all the time. Avoiding or lessening it can save money and the environment. In the United States, the average distance the food on your plate travels is 1,500 miles, she said. During that travel process, 40 percent of the food is lost to rot, damage or lost in transportation. Bond is a big advocator of the Farm-to-Table
movement, which encourages people to buy from local farmers to reduce wasted food and maximize nutrients from the food.
Hailing from DeKalb County, Bond said she’s very active in the sustainable community. She first encountered conservation methods in the Girl Scouts, and was further inspired by her time in the Peace Corps.
“When you go sit out in the Sahara Desert for 18 months and see how little they live with, it gives you a whole new perspective about all the blessings we have here,” she said.
She works to involve churches such as Cave Spring United Methodist, as well as other community members, in efforts to reduce waste and help make the planet a better place to live for everyone.
“I think it is really important for people to know that the churches are working on this,” she said.