Saving leopards, part 2

Updated final paragraphs for clarity.

Of course money can help save leopards. It was cynical of me to say that it doesn't. Just a little bit of money can help a lot, too. National Geographic's Big Cat Initiative, for example, funded a project to fence in the livestock of Masai herders. The Masai have moved into new lands, says National Geographic, where their animals are being killed by lions and leopards; the Masai kill those big cats in retaliation. A more substantial fence (and a lot of discussion, sounds like) dramatically reduces cat/human conflict.

Or there's ALTA, the Amur Leopard and Tiger Alliance, which compensates people for livestock killed by (one of the 30-odd remaining) Amur leopards; and the Snow Leopard Trust, which vaccinates livestock in remote Pakistani villages in exchange for an agreement to leave the leopards alone – under the theory that snow leopards don't kill livestock, common illnesses do.

Simple programs, right? And relatively inexpensive.

The question is, however: Where does an 8-year-old boy get even a little bit of money?

Well, we have an idea. Blake's going to make money from garbage.

**

Three weeks ago we watched the National Geographic show about sea birds who eat plastic. Have you seen that one? Albatross parents fly over the ocean, scanning for food to feed their babies, and they think they see something promising so they scoop it up, but it's not food. It's tiny bits of plastic. Albatross babies eat the plastic and then they die. (According to the linked article, mortality is 40%.)

The show distressed my kids, as you'd imagine. We had a long talk about it, and then we looked inside our own garbage can. Yikes. My daughter started pulling out all the plastics she found in there, saying, "We can't throw this away! We can't!"

So, so. I set our old glass fishbowl on the kitchen counter, and for the last three weeks, rather than trashing non-recyclable plastics, we've been putting them in the bowl.

It's shocking. Really. The city of Bend has a great recycling program, but they don't accept all plastics and let me tell you, there's a lot of plastic in this world. Almost every food comes wrapped in plastic – not just "junk food" but everything: grapes, blueberries, bread, cheese, tortillas, tortilla chips, granola bars... That glass bowl filled pretty quickly. We had plastics all over the counter.

At first I'd thought the kids could reuse most of it, and in fact Sasha took a lot of those flimsy clamshells; but what oh what could we do with the rest?

Well. The company Terracycle buys some plastic garbage: ziplock bags, candy wrappers, chip bags, things like that. They make products from it. They give you mailing labels; you fill an envelope with whichever type of garbage you've committed to providing, and then you mail it to them. For each piece of garbage, they donate (generally) $0.02 to the charity of your choice. Usually they work with large groups, like schools or boy scout troups, but individuals can join, too.

So. As a pilot program – to find out if this is an even remotely feasible way of dispensing with non-recyclables – we're collecting wine corks. Not all wine corks are plastic, of course, but they are garbage and they're easy to collect: our extended family drinks a lot of wine! So far Blake has collected 22 wine corks. At this rate I expect he'll collect 300 corks in a year, which will raise $6 for ALTA.

Yeah.

You can join our wine cork brigade, if you want. I can get you the mailing labels. You have to collect 25 before you can mail them in.