young ethical explorers: October 2019

(This is a letter you are invited to share with others, intended for learning communities....)

Dear ethics-aspiring folks, climate-justice activists, parents and educators, far and wide,

Unpacking the climate-justice activism for some very practical CAN-DO’s for kids to achieve is important. For one thing, people need empowerment in the face of the dire information that climate activism has necessarily exposed.
Both empowerment and potentially solutions come from DEED.

Most immediately, let’s commit to something we can all immediately take action to change:
greening our family practices of celebration.

Engage in the GREEN HOLIDAYS CHALLENGE!

What:

This is an invitation to approach all holidays with creativity and rigor necessary to keep our carbon-footprint minimal. To go beyond RRR thinking and REIMAGINE & RE-PSYCH-ALL.

How:

The most challenging part is this:

RESIST! Redirect shopping from quick easy one-time-use prefab items (hard to reprocess), to sustainable options. For example, do not BUY a costume for Halloween. Instead, challenge your family and friends to join you in making the coolest costumes ever out of recycled, reused, reimagined materials — including past costumes, collected egg cartons, etc!

And PLAY! Make gatherings and games among your friends for the most creative ways to use an eggshell carton, plastic bottles, take-out-food containers, old clothes.

Why:

Many of us humans participate regularly in many green practices, yet when it comes to celebrating holidays, these values go on pause. Think of Halloween, birthdays, other gifting occasions and holidays. Like a blink of an eye within a steady gaze, we barely notice our own glitch in green behaviors on each holiday. Yet holiday celebrants create as much trash on earth in a day as they tried to avoid creating all month long. And then, to top it off, they often throw it away more quickly and less carefully. Instead, honor your month of green-efforts, with green celebrations.

The Big Picture:

How can “being Green” ultimately become more fun, more joy filled, more cool? Please brainstorm this question with your friends and families.

Fun may sound like a frivolous measure – but it drives so much of our human behavior, and so much of our buying of single-use items. Alas, the drive to shop, unbridled, is at the heart of the drive to trash. On top of that, a whole marketing industry, employing many of our top creative minds, goes into making each item on a shelf hard to resist!

In honor of the climate justice movement, make Climate Justice the new “True North” on your moral compass. This will compel decisions you make to go through the litmus test of: “This helps me but does it help the Earth?”

Support:

We have to support each other!

A. Tools: Scroll down for collections of RRR costume-ideas and links.

B. Showcase: You may send a picture of your RRR costume to us and we will post it on the blog in a “RRR-costume photo exhibit!”

C. On Halloween, don’t forget to tell everyone you see who DID make their costume, “Bravo!”
What you put attention towards, can grow!

D. Make “Green” FUN !!!

TALK ABOUT IT!

TEACH ABOUT IT!

HAVE FUN WITH IT!

Imagine the earth thanking you.

Young Ethical Explorers

Ethical Culture NYC