Old TV series

In deference to Plastic-free July, my husband and I are watching the Game of Thrones series.   Many years ago, we'd watched Sopranos, a series about modern-day mobsters who sometimes use plastic bags to suffocate their victims, but in the Game of Thrones, people kill each other with steel or rocks or fire or other natural objects.   So much healthier to die a sustainable death, yes?

Another great plastic-free series is Downton Abbey.  (Can you tell that I tend to watch things long after everyone else is done with them?)  Not so much killing going on there in Downton, but again, there's no plastic to contaminate your viewing experience.  

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My poor kids.  When we watched the Abraham Lincoln movie together a while back, their Miser Mom kept pointing out --- "He was President of the United States, and he didn't have air conditioning!  Did you see that horse-drawn carriage?  Our beat-up Prius is way more comfortable and faster than that!  He didn't have a cell phone!"   My kids just wanted to watch the danged movie, not get yet another lesson in frugal gratitude.

And yet my years of Miser-Mom-ing colors the way I look at so much. 

Plastic was first invented in 1907.  It didn't come into widespread use until the 1960s.   People my age or younger don't know a world without plastic, but believe it or not, the world survived without it very well until the most recent half-century.   I think we ought to use that as inspiration.  Here's one such inspiration, from the My Plastic Free Life blog:

So when the Monterey Bay Aquarium invited me to come and give a presentation during their Plastic Pollution Summit last week — and as a bonus, sleep overnight in the aquarium in the exhibit of my choice — I knew I had to get moving to find an alternative [to a plastic air mattress] that wouldn’t feel like a cement slab. Sure, I could have looked for a secondhand air mattress or camping cot, but since I was going to be giving a talk on plastic-free living, I wanted to see if a plastic-free alternative existed. So I thought… how did people camp before plastic?

I asked eBay, and eBay answered me with a plethora of of vintage army cots made from wood, metal, and cotton canvas.  Zero plastic. This cot has been around since decades before I was born and is still going strong.

So I watch Game of Thrones and I'm delighted by the glass jars in the Maester's laboratory, the leather canteens, the fabric tents.   I watch Downton Abbey and love the kitchen scenes (but wish they'd show the compost heaps or trash bins; somehow those never make it onto the camera).  I'll never ride a dragon, but I keep trying to slay the plastic monster, with my glass canning jars and fabric bags at my side.