Celebrating Earth Day

Experiencing Earth Day last week in Switzerland was striking to me.

There wasn’t much talk. There wasn’t much of a fuss. So much so that if it hadn’t been for my boy’s school and Facebook, I would have missed it completely.

I say that not because I don’t care about the earth but because experiencing Earth Day in Switzerland is more of a daily way of life and less about something to be used for political power, making a point, or making a lot of money.

There is something engrained in the Swiss culture that respects the environment and, therefore, respects your neighbor’s environment as much. It is not necessarily talked about; it is just done.

One of the most noticeable things about walking around the streets of Switzerland is its cleanliness. We live outside the capital city of Bern, and at least once a week, I bring the boys into the city to either see Amy at work or go to one of the markets. Inevitably, the city always looks the same: clean. (Until, of course, the Illig Boys come into town, and we drop everything we have in our hands. My boys, unfortunately, take after me; clumsiness doesn’t fall far from the tree. Consequently, we spend most of our time picking things up. At least they are learning by doing…a silver lining in our clumsiness!!)

Another transition for us as Americans has been recycling and garbage. There is a designated place in every village and town where you bring your items to be recycled. Long gone are the days when I just had to get my small little container to the end of our 15-foot driveway to be picked up at our house in the U.S. Now we drive it over to the recycling center to be sorted out by glass color, plastic, cardboard, and just about everything else under the sun. This process has grown on us in more ways than one. It has not only become another chore on my boys’ lists, but it has also affected our garbage intake.

It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized how much I threw things away in the garbage. I didn’t necessarily mean to. I just didn’t think about it much. In our village, the garbage is picked up twice a week. You buy the garbage bags from the grocery store by size, either 35L or 60L respectively. Then you buy the corresponding stickers to match. This is where the cost piles up.

If we use two bags for every pickup, we go through stickers pretty quickly and, therefore, spend a lot of money on garbage. As a result, we have quickly learned to be careful what we recycle and what we can reuse. This strategy must be working because the trunk of our car has been full on the last two trips to the recycling center.

We have been living here for two months and are adapting to a new culture. In this case, we celebrate Earth Day every day. It doesn’t mean something new to worship, argue about or use for political power. It simply means that we live with a new respect for the gift that we are given.

The gift we call earth.

“The vocation of being a “protector”, however, is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live.”

-Pope Francis