It’s Earth Day today! And with it comes a little “Green” overload. Not to mention the greenwashing.

With all of the news about what’s in our environment and in our supposedly safe natural products, let’s take a moment to back away from the frustration and guilt, and regain a little sanity.

As the saying goes, “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day”. We aren’t going to have a completely safe world in a day either.

I’ve been there before; disheartened to find that despite trying to use the right products, I was using something, well…not quite right. But, you know what? It might in fact be much better than what I was using before. And, you can keep changing till you get it right.

I had been feeling a little deprived because I could really find very few products without chemical derivatives, even though they may have had a lot of organic ingredients. Greenwashing. So, I was glad the recent news about 1,4 dioxane in “healthy products” came out because it validated the problem I’ve had finding the safest products, that still work best for my needs.

But, to put things in perspective, I was going through an old box and looked at some of the hair products I used to use…petroleum chemical everything! While I am not sticking up for manufacturers that are more interested in false marketing than in doing the right thing. Sometimes, doing the pristinely perfect thing is easier said than done.

So, read labels, get rid of the losers and move on.

If there is a better choice, vote with your feet and your pocketbook. It’s funny how industry responds to that after a while. Companies that have the right idea but just need to tweak their products will do so, and we should support them when they do. Companies that only have a marketing ploy will continue to make it hard to sort things out.

And then, what about everything that is in our water and environment? I don’t like what is being found. But I like that fact that it is coming out into the open. So that we can recognize the problem and do something about it. Collectively.

It makes it hard as well when the science of what we know keeps evolving. What seemed OK years ago is certainly not OK now. And, what seemed OK just yesterday is maybe not OK now. Unclear. Unknown. A big fat question mark.That pesky question mark is a problem. Which is why it is a big part of the precautionary principle. Better safe than sorry.

Furthermore, the scientific study methods that we use to figure out what’s what don’t deal very well with multiple shades of inter-related yet separate question marks. Quantifiable science doesn’t do well with uncertainty and more than one question at a time. That little problem makes a handy tool of division between the industrial and environmental sectors.

Which takes me back to the idea of keeping our eye on the goal. We are going to be muddling through the specifics of “what is the best thing to do and how do we do it?” for a while. Likely, with plenty of frustration to go along with it.

We are going to have to figure out how to do all of this with some combination of hope, joy, urgency, forcefulness, peacefulness, serenity and satisfaction.

What do you think?

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