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How to Keep House While Drowning was a really good book that helped me with this and my guilt when I was too drained to use reusable containers and needed to use a paper plate or small things like that. It’s important to care but also important to know it’s okay that I’m trying my best.

Thanks for the shout out!

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I love this piece and agree 100%. We should do what we can, as we can, and keep working towards better for the planet, but none of us can be perfect. Would I love to have cage free eggs from my own chickens? Sure! But I don't have the time to take care of them. I desperately want to compost, but I have to figure out what to do with it once it is done. We REALLY want solar panels, but we're not in a financial position to get them (plus the offerings in Indiana are not what we had when we purchased them in Texas). But our family keeps working to find ways that we can do better.

Coincidentally, this week I wrote a piece for our podcast blog about bringing environmentalism to the English classroom: https://litthinkpodcast.substack.com/p/english-goes-green

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This idea makes me think about the conversations and controversies around energy production. Some of the smarter voices that don't get enough attention point out that using so-called "renewables" is a luxury of first-world countries that outsources the true carbon expenses of these technologies to less advantaged countries -- i.e. solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing. In other words, nothing is free. The story of life is a series of tradeoffs. Are we comfortable with demanding that people who live in harsh climates do without heat or air conditioning for the sake of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels?

People who preach perfection, just as people who tear down imperfect efforts, fundamentally misunderstand (or actively ignore) the complexity native to being human.

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