I held in my palm a tiny, fragile flower. It’s delicate, folded petals imbricate into itself, one curled over the other. Its hue reminded me of the shores of Lake Michigan, a light cerulean sapphire. The velvety little blossom was only an insignificant smudge of color upon my calloused hand — and it was beautiful.

Like the small flower I held in my palm, the natural world among us is observed for its beauty, but all too soon disregarded due to the egocentric tendency of humanity. Nature has always been a present force in our lives but our way of life is destroying it and we treat it as if it will be here forever.

But it won't.

From the moment a child is born, the world is present. From the moment the first forms of life bloomed on this planet, the world was present. Nature has always been in existence as far as we’re concerned, so why would we assume that our actions could ever do anything to cause it to cease existing.

We rely on it to always be there, whether we are conscious of this dependence or not. The Earth merely provides us with the food we consume to remain healthy, the water that hydrates and cleanses our bodies, and the air we suck down to survive.

And what does it get in return? Tons and tons of human-produced carbon emissions that clog the lungs of our atmosphere and gradually heat the Earth’s innards. Billions of pounds of non-disposable wastes that build up in the vast oceans and dense forests, which ultimately chokes the living creatures that inhabit those ecosystems. This is the gift our planet receives for providing life: a gift of death.

There is no possible way we can survive without our environment, and yet to some people, its cleanliness is not seen as a high priority at all. As if it’s below them to care about something as trivial as the environment.

It’s drilled into many of us that we must succeed by society’s standards. We need to constantly strive for perfection, and constantly need to work toward our goals, but what use is that when there is no world for us to succeed in?

Money is what drives many humans, and few bother to understand why the environment needs protecting. Work, errands and ambition consume our lives and hardly leave the time to glance out a window, let alone ponder the magnificence of our world.

Someday the natural wonders that humanity often fails to appreciate or understand could be gone. If we insist on treating our non-renewable resources as renewable, what will be left once they are gone? If we continue to poison our waterways, which provide life to millions of not only humans but animals too, what will remain once Mother Nature’s veins are filled with venom? If we keep cutting down the rain forests, essentially the lungs of Earth, for more and more lumber how will our planet be able to breathe? What will be left for us to corrupt?

Hardly anything.

The importance of nature is often absent from our mortal minds. Instead, we only choose to see the aesthetic beauty of the world for a fleeting moment instead of everything it does constantly to bestow and support all forms of life. At least part of it is observed — perhaps once it gets bad enough we will all begin to notice the other half.

But why wait until we reach a point of no return?

About a year ago, I came across a BuzzFeed video about a young woman named Lauren Singer. She was able to fit all of her trash from the past five years into a regular sized Mason jar. She talked about an up and coming way of life called Zero Waste.

Living Zero Waste can mean different things to different people, but for Lauren, it means limiting the amount of trash she sends to landfills and incinerators to zero. To achieve this, Lauren makes her own hygiene and cleaning products, and shops at the farmers market or bulk stores with her own reusable bags. When she goes shopping for clothes she visits second-hand shops and has sworn off department stores and malls, as well as foods and products that come in plastic or non-degradable packaging.

On a larger, societal scale, Zero Waste is a movement. It’s defined by the GrassRoots Recycling Network as “…a philosophy and a design principle for the 21^st Century.”

Zero Waste takes recycling and renovates it into a way of approaching the vast flow of resources and waste through human society. So instead of the one-way industrial system our society currently encompasses (production line to the consumer to landfill), Zero Waste focuses on a cyclical system modeled after natural processes found in nature. It maximizes recycling, minimizes waste and ensures that products are made to be reusable, recyclable or repairable.

Given the choice between trashing the planet to the point of permanent damage and slowly making changes in our societies, communities and homes to produce less garbage and carbon emissions, I choose to consider the later and you should too.

Going Zero Waste is a personal choice, and it’s not for everyone, but the next time you’re out shopping, look at all the plastic packaging you see on the shelves. Start to notice how often you go to the garbage bin to throw something away. Take note of how often household appliances break down because they aren’t “made like they used to be,” and it’s true; products aren’t made to last so that consumers consume more, more quickly.

Becoming more conscious of how much trash you’re producing, and wanting to change that, can be a start on the path of sustainability; and that can lead to a greener, healthier, brighter and more beautiful future.