This finishable quality does not exist everywhere. Very few places, I've found, can say "aaaand we're done" and have it be true. It certainly isn't true when one looks at our world. Helping it. Living with it, not merely on it.
Part of that is quantity. There are a lot of humans (and other living, thinking creatures; but I think in the malicious actions category humans win hands down, so I'll be focusing on us. That and: I don't speak cat. Well. But LOLspeak doesn't count.) living here ("Heavy breeders," as Maldis said) and using the planet as best we can, but I don't think that's all. There's something to be said for intent.
Clive and I were talking about not wasting. He mentioned that for him and his brother, it was fairly automatic: they were raised by parents who had lived through the immediate after affects of the Great War and WWII in England. They didn't have anything, "and then they had us," and conserving was not only the financially smart thing to do, but it was a show of solidarity and patriotism. It was second nature, and a close second.
I can not say that our family had a lot. We always had enough, but that was frequently because we did without something else. It was never that final step of 'lights and heat or food?' but I have a feeling I have grandparents to thank for that. But for some reason that step farther, of reusing something until it was entirely disintegrated; of creatively doing something else so you don't even realize you're not being wasteful... There's a philosophical link missing. Or, I now think, not missing, but cauterized.
I live in one of the most plentiful, beautiful nations on our earth. People have come here to make something more of their lives. This is, I think, a place people come to so they don't have to conserve, or pay attention to how much they're using. We have all these amazing resources; how much more wasteful and ungrateful is it to not use them? Preserve? For what? The very idea is antithetical to the essential concept of this country.
Or rather, of what this country imagines itself to be. In truth, the notion of stewardship is an old one and not foreign here. The time is upon us - all of us, Americans or not, liberal or not, every person who lives on this planet having an equal share in responsibility for what happens to it - to consciously consider what we're doing here. And how we can make it better.
This work - of caring for our planet - will never be finished. Hopefully.
*Please note a very tangible difference between knitting and theatre: while both very specifically depend on two parties (knitter and knitted for, production team and audience (and in both of these cases the two parties can be the same person)), both require a surprising amount of patience and faith and neither are taken too very seriously in the US, when knitting is done it lives on in the the finished product. Barring uncouth washing habits (or other things I won't think of since I've only had a little bit of caffeine so far today) that finished product will be what it is, give or take, until it dies. Ye olde performance piece, on the other hand, not only has no afterlife to speak of (and don't speak to me of videos. There's a significant difference between theatre and film, and to think that just watching someone's home video of a play is the same as being there is an insult to both media) but it's never the same one night to the next. Ever. It can't be. That's one of the amazing things about live performance, one of the things I love hearing from people who haven't ever been to see something professionally produced: it's something completely different from anything else they've experienced. Because they were a part of it. And no one who wasn't in that room that night will ever see that production. And the amazing thing is that this does not mean the performed arts are entirely mortal. They live on in the memories of everyone who was there.
