Live Your Values

To live green in mainstream American society takes a thick skin. And since the culture makes little accommodations for green living – in fact, it presents obstacles at every turn — it’s easy to poke holes at one’s behavior. That is, those of us who make a genuine effort are often accused, at best, of contradictions, and at worst of of hypocrisy.

For onlookers, it’s easier to mock than give credit for effort.

For example, buying a Prius is a real effort at reducing one’s carbon footprint. It’s also a political statement, far more than a bumper sticker. It says: I care and I’m doing something about it.

Now there are times when a Prius owner needs to fly across the country for business or even for a family vacation. How fast will neighbors, coworkers and family members unfairly point out the irony here?

Thoreau was seen as ridiculous to his fellow Concordians. And his critics love to point out that he went to town several times a week to take care of something or another, as if that fact eradicates everything noble about a man living alone in a hand-built one-room cabin in the woods for two years, including through two New England winters.

On that note, New Yorker magazine environmental staff reporter Elizabeth Kolbert – who by the way lives in the Berkshires of Massachusetts – reviewed, or should I say mocked,  several recently released books that describe a variety of green adventures.

The review primarily talks about Colin Beavan’s “No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes about Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process.” Beavan lives with his wife and daughter in a ninth-floor Manhattan apartment. They set out to have zero impact on the environment within one year. Yes, no elevator, no toilet paper, no heat – their walls are hot from their neighbors heat – no tissues, no newspaper, no subway, no bus, no car, his wife takes a scooter to work, and on and on ad infinitum.

Another book Kolbert knocks down a few shelf levels is “Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet.”  Kolbert is quick to highlight their follies, like when they failed to find local salt, so they journey 12 hours to the Pacific Ocean for a pot of salt water. Kolbert says it would have been more ecologically sound to get a pound from the local store. That, of course is obvious, but missing the point. That the salt in the corner store had its own journey from somewhere far. What does it take, authors Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon explore, to eat locally in a real way?  And if everyone committed like they did, would that create real change in the marketplace?

The next book she batted around was Vanessa Farquhuarson’s “Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car and Found Love in 366 Days.” The author’s premise is to make one new green life-style change every day for a year.  She does large and small things like sell her car and, on another day, give up using tooth picks.  Kolbert notes that she flies a lot and explains a few of the trips, implying that they were unnecessary trips, like a writers workshop, a bike trip, and to meet No Impact Man. She admits to no toilet paper for number one, but can’t for number two. No Impact Man claims no toilet paper for both. How’s that for impact.

Kolbert sums all these people up as stunts, more or less stumps to make a book. She lumps Thoreau into the group as a stunt. To do this, she brings into the mix a new book critical of Thoreau. It’s one thing to be unfair to the folks above, but it’s another to lower Thoreau into some wanna-be pop-culture phenom. Thoreau is an authentic father and friend of natural living and sought to do nothing but “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. . . . To live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life . . . .to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms .. . .

Being ahead of the green curve is hard work, and Kolbert should recognize that the modeling of good green behavior can appear ridiculous because the current system forces one to perform ridiculous acts. It’s a culture that promotes bad environmental behavior, so for those who seek to be good, it requires one to appear radical. In a time of war, those for peace look out of place.