Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation. A Healing Arts Practitioner, she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Integrative Healthcare. She says, " Health is resiliency, a zest for the journey. It’s about coming awake to the joy of being alive. As a practitioner, its a privilege to facilitate that healing process, to help weave new patterns of health & well-being.

To celebrate Earth Day I dropped off the contents of four big bags of recycling at one of the sets of bins Gallatin County maintains in Bozeman. I love the diversity of people I see at the recycling bins, many of them my age and older. I wonder what motivates folks to recycle, is it an “Earth Day” consciousness, a desire to lessen a garbage bill? What? For me, it’s habit. I’ve been doing this since way back the first Earth Day in 1970, and possibly before. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and recycling came to us early on. It was a statement of commitment “I am a part of the movement to save our Earth.”

A lot of things seemed possible 45 years ago. I can’t help but feel profoundly disappointed at how things have progressed, or not. Sometimes the weight of that disappoinment, of missed opportunity, wants to press the breath out of me.

I graduated in Envioronmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, thought I might practice environmental law. I wanted to change the world, our world. Life often had other ideas for me, unexpected trajectory after unexpected trajectory. These days I often feel recycled and repurposed.

I celebrated the first Earth Day at a crafts fair of sorts on the Stanford campus with my boyfriend Steve. I felt pretty important, attending the first of something like that, at the forefront of a movement. Steve and I met on a Sierra Club trip in the Trinity Alps. We went to clean up an airplane wreck. A year later we joined a group to clean up another in the Bob Marshall. And that was what brought me to Montana. The aluminium from those planes? Recycled.

A junior in college, I returned to Montana to do field work on the Crow Indian Reservation. I liked it enough that I returned the summer of 1974. I volunteered for the Crow Office of Coal Research. What I mostly remember is a few of us flying down to Gillette Wyoming in a little tin can of a prop plane (Me who later became so afraid of planes that when I traveled to California to see my parents, I would take the train from Utah to San Francisco). The size of the strip mines we visited and of the equipment used overawed me and not in a good way.

While living at Crow Agency, I often walked the Farigrounds in the mornings, past the old, log roundhouse, past the bare arbor waiting for the next Crow Fair. As I walked, I picked up cast off alumnium cans. It was good picking.. I took them for recycling in Hardin and made a few dollars. Later my ex and I, low income parents trying to build a livelihood, took cans for recycling to an old metal-sided warehouse on Bozeman’s north side of Bozeman.

Decades later, I noticed when recycling bins started showing up in airports. I noticed when they showed up downtown. In Yellowstone National Park. And I like that little fringe movement from the 70’s going big time, mainstream.

I only wish that I believed what I used to do: that there was salvation in this for us all.

I hadn’t actually planned on my recycling stop today. I wasn’t meaning to make a statement about Earth Day. I just was passing by the bins and the bags were in the car ready to go: newspaper, plastic, cardboard, tin. Aluminum. It was only later that it occurred to me, what day it was. And then I began recycling memory too.