Self-aware self-care: rethinking artificiality to save the planet

Small Feet: What gets left behind when we leave

A few weeks ago, my feet carried me up Mount Katahdin, allowing me to check one more thing off of the “50 Things To Do Before You Graduate” list. Along with eight other women, I packed a bag, hopped in a van and drove the 202 miles to Baxter State Park—the famed wilderness area frequented by orientation trips and visitors from around the globe. We camped overnight before waking up at dawn to hike up 5,267 feet to the summit of Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail and the tallest peak in Maine.
You’ve probably heard of Katahdin before, and maybe you’ve even climbed the peak yourself. Baxter State Park and Baxter House have the same namesake and are similarly famous among Bowdoin students, but Baxter State Park is, probably, a little wilder and a little harder to get to. When I decided to spend the majority of my weekend traipsing around in the woods, I was less concerned about getting to the top of the mountain, and more about what it took to get me to the trailhead.
I packed my belongings for this trip in a North Face daypack and an L.L. Bean overnight pack. I carried three plastic Nalgene water bottles, wore layers of fleece, Gore-Tex and Capilene and donned my trusty Patagonia trucker hat. My fellow hikers and I drove in two Bowdoin minivans, stopping in the bustling metropolis of Millinocket for gas, bathroom breaks and Cheetos. We camped in tents owned by the Bowdoin Outing Club and made by Mountain Hardwear, and cooked our meal on a propane stove. To keep up our strength as we hiked, we munched Snickers bars, and when we reached the top of the mountain, we recruited another hiker to snap a photo on my iPhone of us gathered around the sign marking the summit.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. Scholars, activists and other college newspaper columnists have talked about how much we consume and how many products and items we use in our daily lives. Each of the things I just mentioned has a story and an impact that is all its own, and I am privileged to use these items for my own purposes. My trip up Katahdin was a trip bigger than myself—it was an accumulation of adventure equipment branding strategies, petroleum products, people’s labor and much more. In no way do I mean to minimize the many benefits of outdoor recreation, or the opportunity made possible by the Bowdoin Outing Club to travel to northern Maine and hike this iconic, beautiful and humbling peak. Thinking about what got me to the top of Katahdin was only one part of a wonderful experience in a beautiful part of my home state.
Going anywhere—Baxter State Park or Baxter basement—requires some preparation. It also requires consciousness about what we’re leaving behind. Once we’re immersed in an experience, it can be difficult to remember how we got there and what impact we’re making as we enjoy our adventure. But at the same time, going elsewhere can remind us of what’s really important: what we bring along with us and what we bring back are both telling. Baxter State Park requires you to bring out all trash that you bring in, to only step on certain parts of the trail to preserve vegetation and to brush your teeth in the middle of a parking lot with no running water, spraying your used toothpaste into the air. Going places can make us more conscious—when you see what you bring and leave behind, you can learn something about yourself.
As Bowdoin students, we have a lot of destinations, and something is always getting us there. We’re wrapped up in something when we get up to the top of the mountain, and this isn’t a bad thing. In fact, these things make our lives pretty comfortable, and I really like having three layers of fleece on when I’m so high up off the ground.
I haven’t calculated the total carbon cost of my trip up Katahdin, but I have thought about making my own Snickers bars to avoid disposable wrappers (still working on how to make nougat…). We don’t have to stop driving a car or buying things, but I think we could all be a little more conscious about the stories and impacts behind our experiences. This consciousness can make our own stories more complete and help us realize our place—and the place of our actions—in the world around us.
Even though thinking about our impacts can be uncomfortable, it’s a necessary part of having experiences. The list of things to do before you graduate isn’t just 50 isolated things —it’s part of a bigger narrative, and remembering what got us to those points is part of our experience, too.So lace up your Bean Boots. Zip up your jacket. Take off for your next destination (even if it’s just to the library), and keep in mind the things that are helping you get there.

Small Feet: Everyday voting: a post-election plan

Instead of thinking about the choices America has made, I’m thinking about the choices we will be making. I’ve said before that at Bowdoin we have to make a lot of choices—Moulton or Thorne, tea or coffee, sleep or homework. For the past year, we’ve focused on making a choice between two people and this was a huge decision with huge implications. Now that the dust has settled from Election Day, we can think about other choices, too.
The fact is that choosing a president is a really big decision, but there are other decisions that are bigger than two people that don’t have a campaign season or a party. These are choices about the kind of people that we want to be, the kind of country we want to be a part of and the kind of world we want to live in and leave behind. They aren’t always national races—sometimes they happen in the library, the dining hall or the classroom. These choices don’t have an Election Day, a time when we can cast a ballot, wait for results to come in and know that our decision has made a difference.
Or do they?
I think that every day might be a sort of Election Day. The choices we make at Bowdoin on November 9 can have the same significance as our choices on November 8. Remembering that our choices have an impact every day can help us affect the kind of change we want to see, so we might not have to wait another four years to realize the things that are important to us.
Here at Bowdoin, many of us were privileged to vote in Tuesday’s election. Many of us also have the privilege to vote in other ways on the other 364 days out of the year. We, as adults, can vote with our money, our time, our enthusiasm, our careers and more. Regardless of how you voted for president, you have other opportunities to put plans and agendas into action. Whether you’re volunteering at a local school, choosing to buy fair trade coffee, advocating for LGBTQ+ rights or going out of your way to practice extra kindness in your day-to-day life, these things matter too, even when they can feel small.
When we buy textbooks, our money that goes to the author says, “Yes, I like what you’re doing. Do more of it” (or at least “My professor likes what you’re doing. Do more of it”). When we spend our time volunteering for the environment, social justice or reproductive rights, we’re saying “You are worthy of my time and my energy, and I will give up my time to rest or watch Netflix because I like what you’re doing. Do more of it, I want to help.” When we choose jobs (way down the line—I’m looking at you, Career Planning), we’re saying “This is important enough to me that I want to spend 40+ hours a week doing it. Do more of it.”
Spending our money and our time and our lives on something is voting. Not in quite the same way, perhaps. But we make choices every day that are part of issues and ideas larger than even a presidential candidate and since we have four years until another election, let’s not forget about voting with our individual choices and actions until 2020 comes around.
At Bowdoin, we are a community with a wide range of opinions and experiences and we didn’t all make the same choice in Tuesday’s election. But since we’re part of the same community, I think we value some things in common, too—things that we’re still voting on now. It’s time to zoom in from the race between two candidates and see what choices we can make now, today, for issues of economic, racial, social and environmental justice.
I write in this column about the individual impacts that we make as Bowdoin students and this week, I see those impacts as mini-ballots. After looking at the red-and-blue map on Tuesday, let’s focus our attention on ourselves and our surroundings and keep voting for the things that matter to us.

Small Feet

Self-aware self-care: rethinking artificiality to save the planet

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Emma Moesswilde

Columnist

October 28, 2016

Our bodies take a lot of stress—lack of sleep, lack of water, excess caffeine, countless hours curled up in front of a laptop. Before I came to Bowdoin, I had never even heard the term “self-care.” Now, it’s one of my favorite phrases. As we’ve probably all heard, it’s important for us to take care of our bodies. That means different things to different people, and to me it means spending my Saturday evening melting shea butter and coconut oil together and then mixing them aggressively with a fork.

Several years ago, I made the somewhat random decision to completely overhaul my entire collection of cosmetics and personal care products and replace them with things that I would feel comfortable eating as well as putting on my skin. Somewhere, I had read about the skin being the body’s largest organ, and after several hours spent Googling “wash face with sugar,” I was convinced that every makeup product I could buy, I could also make for myself for much less money and with fewer negative consequences for myself or the planet.

Fast forward to me unpacking a large bottle of apple cider vinegar and a small jar of baking soda next to my first year roommates’ moisturizers and perfumes and awkwardly explaining to visitors why our room smelled like salad to visitors. I hadn’t bought moisturizer in a year and I was mixing my own dry shampoo in a spice shaker; making my own personal care products had become a hard-to-explain fun fact that I’d brought with me to college.

Self-care looks different to everyone, but for many people—including myself—it means taking a little time to look after our bodies to keep them in good working (and smelling) order. And, like anything, this isn’t as straightforward as it looks. A look into a typical Bowdoin student’s personal care routine (even negligible ones) reveals deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, body wash, shaving cream and any number of moisturizers, perfumes and types of makeup. These products are all necessary for us to take care of ourselves, but their impacts aren’t just skin deep.

A closer look at your favorite shampoo, toothpaste or deodorant likely reveals that it’s wrapped in plastic, some part of which may end up in a landfill instead of being recycled. Another look may show a list of very long compound words you might not even have seen in Orgo I, some of which may be linked to human health problems such as nerve damage. Many of these products do not have guarantees of ethical production, meaning that they may damage the health of producers, factory workers and the environment. Taking care of ourselves just got a lot more complicated.

There are a lot of ways in which academic and social commitments take precedent over my own health at Bowdoin: eating cereal for dinner or skipping a day (okay, a month) at the gym are two examples. But in my effort to keep myself healthy, I’ve found that Netflix breaks aren’t the only way in which I can make time to take care of myself. Focusing on what I put on my body is a way to be conscious about taking care of it, and to understand more about the environmental and social impacts of the contents of my shower caddy. This means that I mix my own deodorant out of potato starch, baking soda, coconut oil and shea butter. It also means that I spent a lot of time smelling very bad while I perfected this recipe and that instead of swinging by Hannaford or hitting up Amazon when I need more of something, I have to head into the kitchen.

This isn’t for everyone—as we know, there are an infinite number of ways to practice self-care and be conscious about the impacts of our actions on the planet and ourselves. Making your own deodorant may seem like a drastic step to take in the face of some plastic shampoo bottles and studies on endocrine disruption, but it doesn’t have to be dramatic, and it can be fun: I think of these habits as an extension of both my academic interests and my personal values.

If you’re feeling inspired, here are a few tips: The next time you need to stock up on personal care products, read some labels. Look for whole ingredients that are easy to pronounce and don’t have 15 syllables. Try to buy something packaged in recycled and recyclable materials—paper is best—or without any packaging at all. Shampoo in bar form is just as effective as liquid shampoo, is wrapped in paper and is made of ingredients you can trust. (The first ingredient in my shampoo bar, for instance, is beer.) Find things like this at Hannaford, Morning Glory or online. If you’d prefer the DIY route, try washing your face with baking soda instead of store-bought face wash, or get creative and make a scrub out of sugar and coconut or olive oil. Our bodies can all use more love; a little extra time and energy can make self-care a way to be conscious of the impact our choices have on the planet and on our own bodies.

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