“What good is a nice house if you don’t have a healthy planet to put it in?”                                                                                             H.D. Thoreau

A nice house is useless if our bigger house is fowled. The pathology works from both ends, top-down and down-up. Let’s start with population growth. Boom, WAIT! This essay has to stop right here. Native American built structures that decomposed and left no toxic remains. Now, archeologists clamor to find remnants to learn about their lifestyles.

Our houses need water, electricity, food, clothing, petrochemicals for our gas grills and cars. YES – Remnants end up in our bigger house and has come back to bite. 9 billion residents in the big house is a bit much, don’t you think? But, now that we have them, what to do? While governments try to do the big stuff, we try with the little stuff. Still, sustainibility isn’t happening.

We’ve lost our connection to our bigger house compared to our Native American citizens, those here now and those back then. Do we really need 3,000 square feet of space to survive? Do we need as much and many  of the luxuries we now enjoy? Do we really need radios in our cars? Cars?

Natives lived in a community determined by their source of food and other resources. How about entertainment. Many homes now have “entertainment centers”. Our natives had the outdoors and a small space in their dwellings for fun. Do we really need jet skis? Do we really need all the stuff in our garages, closets, and aatics? Think of your garage as Earth. This translates into our landfills – stuff we don’t need, and let’s not call it garbage? It’s waste. We humans wast too much of everything.

We do need shelter, and all the other stuff to live? But at what expense…Rising sea level? Increasing wildfires? Air that chokes, water unfit to drink?

Here is Suffolk County, we have one point five million residents. Here in Suffolk County we have eight hundred thousand vehicles. Something’s got  to give. Take our ground water. It’s a problem. We broke it, we fix it. Some of us live so close to Kennedy Airport that every time an aircraft takes off, the dishes rattle in the kitchen. Noise is part of the bigger house we live in, our immediate community. Wait, let’s call it our neighborhood the bedroom community. How many of us leave our community to drive to work? For me, that’s not really living in our communities. Native American communities, small by necessity, had complete cooperation from its members just to survive.

I envy their lifestyle.  They embody Henry’s nice planet, nice house idea. Let’s turn Donald Trump’s slogan Keep American Great to Keep America nicer.” Where’s the hope for our future? I don’t use paper towel when I wash my hands in the men’s room. I shake the water off and slap my hands against the back of my pants and walk out almost completely dry.

Decades ago the aphorism that came out was reduce, recycle, and reuse. Lets add two more “R’s to the equation…Refuse ( plastic shopping bags) and RETHINK.  FOR EACH OF US,  HOW DOES OUR HOSE AFFECT OUR EARTH HOME. Drastic changes are necessary. Let it begin with me.