GroovyGreen.com – Start Today :: Save Tomorrow

[Ed note: cross-posted from La Marguerite]

12 by 8. That’s the universe I live in. 12 by 8, inches. Twelve hours a day, glued to my computer screen. I know, I can use my eyes, and my ears, and my mind to visit the world, from that tiny window. Still, that feels pretty limiting. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, until last weekend, when I decided to follow Charlotte’s hint to plant some vegetables in our yard.

In the midst of pulling out some weeds, it hit me big that I hadn’t been out in the world, really out, in a long long time. Out, as in getting down close to the earth. Out, as in getting drunk from forgotten smells, the grasses, the dirt, the air. Out, as in hearing the white noise from the dancing stems. Out, as in seeing the nearly invisible hairs on the tiny leaves . Out as in fighting with the subterranean roots, that threatened to overtake the fertile soil. Three hours later I rose, my body aching, and happy.

Since then, it has come to my attention, that the wonder of the Internet, and more broadly technology, comes at a price. We have shrunk our world to a series of metal boxes and rectangles. Computer, TV, car, plane, it’s all the same. A world that is tasteless, odorless, and cold. A world that filters all the noises and sights from the outside, according to some pre-established programs. A world that takes us further and further away from nature.

No wonder I feel cut off. 12 by 8, inches, that’s the extent of my connection.

Last Sunday came at the end of a hectic week. All I wanted was to sleep in, and read the New York Times, and do more of nothing. There was only one problem. Lashy, my Little Sister, was waiting for me. The thought of canceling brushed my mind. For a second, I imagined what it would be like to not get dressed, and stay home. The pleasure of being lazy. No, I had to honor my commitment to her. I knew she had been looking forward to our outing, all week. When she called, I answered that yes, I was coming to pick her up and we would go ice skating as planned.

I have been thinking about what it is that moved me to go through the effort of meeting Lashy last Sunday. And what’s the difference with not following through with some of my green commitments? When I say I am not going to drive to the gym, and I am going to bike instead, and then I drop the ball, and grab my car key, what is it that happens? In the case of Lashy, it is my heart that moves me. I empathize with her, and I don’t want to disappoint her. In the bike – no car situation, there is no one to relate to, except myself. I know ‘I should’, and if I don’t go through, the only person that’s being let down is ‘moi’. I can deal with that. I am pretty good at rationalizing . . .

This is why 12-Steps Programs require their members to attend meetings, and more importantly, to choose a sponsor. The sponsor is the person that keeps the addict honest, and makes it hard for him or her to relapse. In the climate fight, we are all supposed to wean ourselves from our addictive habits of convenience and comfort. On our own. I say, we each need a green sponsor, a person with whom we can contract and who will hold us responsible to our promises. Someone we respect and whom we don’t want to let down. Wal-Mart is onto something with its Personal Sustainability Promise initiative.

My question to you is, who would you choose as your green sponsor?

I surprised myself with the strength of my response to Charlotte and Prad. ‘No way, I am riding my bike. I am tired and it’s cold.’ Never mind that I was going to the gym to exercise. My heart was set on swimming, not biking. Still, if I had enough energy to swim, I probably could have biked. It is just that I was thinking exercise equal gym. To exercise I needed to go to the gym. Although I was tired, I am very disciplined about exercising every day, and I was willing to make that effort. In my mind, going to the gym, was in the transportation category, not the exercise file. Transportation meant, I was going to naturally choose the option that was most efficient time wise, and comfortable.

Now, why was I willing to make the effort to exercise (swim) although I was not feeling so good, but not to bike instead of driving? The answer is, I consider exercise a direct personal benefit to my health and my well being. Biking instead of driving, because of environmental concerns, does not affect me directly. (that’s assuming I maintain earlier ‘logic’ of biking not as an exercise form, but as mode of transportation). Its benefit gets diluted both in time and space. The big pot problem again. When I exercise, I feel an immediate personal benefit. When I consider acting from my green conscience, it falls in the higher category of ‘I and many other enlightened people know it’s the right thing to do, but it is not part yet of the commonly accepted set of ethical behaviors’. Where I get in trouble is with that latter part. The lack of collective consciousness in the green category, and the resulting lack of environmental laws and best practices, both give me license to err.

Am I that selfish of a person that I never do anything for the greater good? Actually, there are many instances when I can act selflessly. My maternal instinct makes sure I always put my children’s interests before my own. I find great pleasure in mentoring my Little Sister. For seven years, I spent my time helping people as a profession. In the green category even, I now make sure that I bring my recyclable bags to the grocery store. I try not to flush. I have diminished my shopping significantly. I only heat the house very selectively. I always turn off the lights. I take the train whenever I go to the city. . . My laziness with biking is one of the last fortresses of my unconscious, not so green self, and a window into the ways most of the civilized world behaves. Here is what I saw:

1. We are creatures of the flesh. Trapped in our physical body, and at the mercy of our basic needs for physical comfort, pleasure, and immediate gratification. Without the external reinforcement from state or spiritual laws, these primal needs take precedence over our conscience.
2. We are lemmings. We look around and tend to emulate others’ behaviors.
3. We are self-centered. Our priorities start with getting our personal needs met first. Needs for security, personal health, financial security, comfort, safety, education, etc. Environmental concerns are at the bottom of the pile.
4. We are products of our culture. In America that means capitalism, money, greed, consumerism, extremes, convenience, industrialization, technology, cars, invincibility, man over nature.
5. We are creatures of habits. Our thoughts and behaviors are set in certain ways. To unset them requires tremendous energy and outside forces.
6. We are inherently lazy. Given the choice, we will most often pick the easiest, most convenient alternative.
7. We are not rational beings. The way we derive our thoughts is often circuitous, and leads to behaviors that fly in the face of reason.

Next, is how can we take into account these seven characteristics of human nature, and formulate winning behavioral change strategies for a greener planet. Plenty of material for my blog…

Yesterday, I wrote this public letter to the future president of the United States, and I posted it on my blog:

To the Future President of the United States,

I am writing to ask that you please hear what I have to say as a concerned Green Girl Wannabe. See, there are all these talks in the media, about us, the people not being good green citizens.

Not a day goes by, without us being accused of dumping more nasty gases into the air. We are told we drive too much, cars that are too big for our own good. We consume too much electricity. We are guilty of passively supporting coal mountaintop removal in the Appalachian Mountains. We fly too much. Our houses are too big. We don’t shut off our computers at night. We should be using public transportation more. We consume too much. We use too many plastic bags. We are responsible for a huge Garbage Patch in the midst of the Atlantic. We should recycle more. We should all have solar installations on our roofs. We should stop using our dryers and hang our clothes to dry on clotheslines. We should conserve water. We should plant more trees. We generate too much garbage. We eat too much red meat. We should stop our junk mail. We should weatherize our homes. We should switch to tankless water heaters. We should insulate. We should find jobs closer to home. We should stop procreating so much. We should . . .

Do you get it? I am overwhelmed with all that’s thrown at me. I have enough to deal with as it is. I’ve got family worries to deal with, teenagers rebelling, a mother going insane with Alzheimer’s, work to be done, the angst of midlife striking, a house to keep, and not enough hours in the day to keep it all together. And now, I am supposed to become a green citizen, on top of it all. Don’t get me wrong, I do want to be green. I am convinced the human race is heading towards catastrophe, unless we all start changing our ways, quick. I just can’t make these changes right now, the way things are set up. This is where you come into play.

I need you, Future President, to step up to the challenge, and lead us all with a vision to inspire, and a plan that will make it impossible for me and my fellow citizens to fail in our green wannabe efforts. The folks at the Presidential Climate Action Project already gave you a list of 300 concrete steps they want you to take as soon as we elect you. I also have a list, of 15 things I need from you:

1. Make it harder for me to sin, and impose a carbon tax on all my bad habits
2. Have standards in place that will let me know what is green and what is not
3. Make it free for me to install solar on my roof
4. Make it possible for me to trade in my old appliances for Energy Star appliances
5. Make it hard for me to use my car, and set curfews.
6. Set the example, and be a green citizen yourself
7. Take the troops out of Irak, and train them as green soldiers to weatherize homes, do solar installs, and retrofit cars
8. Ban bad plastics
9. Impose limits on packaging
10. Encourage telecommuting
11. Cover the land with solar and wind farms, and more trees
12. Lower the speed limit on freeways
13. Build a national green transportation infrastructure of more trains, more buses, car share, bike routes, and no car zones.
14. One day a month ask your people to do one green thing
15. Sign the Basel Convention, so I can feel better about recycling my computer

These are all the things I need from you, Future President, if I am going to come through with my responsibilities as a green citizen.

Respectfully,

La Marguerite

Now that’s just one letter, from me. Wouldn’t it be cool if all the other concerned green wannabe citizens started each writing their own letter as well. I am sending a call out to the Groovy Green community to get the momentum going. Let’s see how many letters we can get. You can post it as a comment, and then we will take it from there.

Yesterday was Black Friday. Despite all my good intentions, I ended up joining the crowds at the mall. I have gotten much better at taming my consuming urges, to the point where I do not even feel the desire any more. To refuse my daughter, however, that’s another story altogether. She was so sweet, and I wanted to please her. Off we went, and ended purchasing all three items on her ‘need or rather want’ list. If I still had any remaining doubts on the extent of the challenge facing our society, the sight of all these people, happily walking from store to store, multiple shopping bags in hand, and on a mission to find more bargains, put an end to them.

Then, comes Adbusters, and its arresting Buy Nothing Day TV ad with a burping pig, calling for us to put a stop to our consuming frenzy. I did not know about Buy Nothing Day, until a few days ago. Now, it seems everywhere I turn, someone has vowed to not buy anything for a day, a week, and sometimes even as long as a year. You can make it as tough as you like, depending on your own fortitude. The Compact people are gathering momentum, and their two year old Yahoo Group of diehard non-shoppers is going strong with 8,500 members. There is also No Impact Man and his one year experiment.

From one extreme, to the other. Either you can shop till you drop dead, or you are to stop shopping, cold turkey. In both cases, I dare question the sustainability of such extreme behaviors. It is now an established realization, that we cannot keep on consuming the way we do, without jeopardizing life as we know it on this planet. What concerns me, is the route taken by some to try to correct the problem. Crash diets do not work in the long run. It may be that those extreme non-shoppers are playing a balancing role on the collective level, by providing a much needed counterpoint to extreme consumerism. On an individual level however, very few individuals can sustain that kind of restrictive behavior. The changes must be gradual, and feed into existing lifestyles. Rather than fighting consumerism, lets turn it on its head, and gently redirect people to making more intelligent purchases. One such initiative is the Interra Project.

Last, I would like to suggest that the path to sustainable changes, begins with consciousness. An easy place to start with, is to document personal consumption, for a single day, down to the littlest detail. For a template, you may go to my blog, under the Daily Footprint Project category.

[pic via nextstopwonderland]

Every year, I go to the Green Festival in San Francisco. This time, I was hoping to find some interesting material to report on in my blog. Getting there was quite a feat. Since I was going with four other people, we had decided against the train, in favor of the car. The traffic to access was simply horrendous. I finally gave up trying to find street parking, and had to part with $20 at the public parking lot across the street.

I recognized my friend Dominique’s Adina bus parked in front of the festival. Right away, I felt at home. My other two friends were late to meet me, so I had plenty of opportunities to observe the scene at the entrance. Lots of dusty shoes, organic cottons, and earthy colors. I felt a bit out of place with my J Crew raincoat, and Robert Clergerie shoes. Legacy from a fashionable past, that is still very much a part of me. Petitioners of all sorts were competing for my signature. I gladly added my name to the Sustainable Farming list. One man tried to explain why I should care about Eminent Domain. Should I? My friends showed up finally, we got our official green bracelet in exchange for personal information about ourselves. I wonder what they do with the information. Does the festival sell it to marketers?

The Exhibition Hall was packed with booths, hundreds of them, all trying to sell us something. Soap, teas, books, T-shirts, fair trade scarves, renewable energies, TV shows, food, chocolate, lunch boxes, jewelry, cars, bikes, social networks, magazines, alpaga coats, pet food, seeds, toys, travels, cell phones, salad bowls, . . . and a lot more I can’t remember. I came to make connections with people in the green social network space, and also to visit Dominique at the Adina booth. Soon, though, I got caught in a sampling frenzy, my hands full of flyers, and magazines of all sorts. What to do with all the stuff? I could only hold so much. I started thinking, I should have brought a bag. But then, I had not come here expecting to collect so much. That’s when I noticed the crowd around the PG&E lady. I quickly grabbed one of the free canvas bags she was handing out. Now I was free to resume my chase for more goodies.

As I made my way through the festival, a light went on in my head. More important than all the green words being uttered, and the green products and services being promoted, was the consumerist subtext for the whole event. Consuming has become such a part of our cultural fabric, that there is really no way around it. Trying to get people to consume less is a doomed enterprise. A more successful strategy is to help redirect consumption towards greener alternatives. This makes me question the ‘Green Consumer?’ article, I wrote earlier, about green consumer being an oxymoron. I was advocating green citizenry. Now I am thinking the concept of green citizen may be too idealist. Green consumer may be less pure, but a lot more realistic.

[ed note: visit Marguerite at her blog, well worth the read!]

Starting the day with a mammogram is not something I look forward to. When Diane, the technician, asks how I am, I feel compelled to elaborate beyond the usual niceties, and to share my real thoughts. How I have seen this documentary, ‘The Toxic Bust’, about breast cancer, and how I am still processing the stories and the information from the movie. Diane does not know about the movie, and she is curious. I start telling her about the environmental pollutants that are tied to breast cancer. She squishes my right breast between the two plates. ‘Hold on, right there. Don’t breathe.’ She wants to know what are the things to avoid. I share what I remember. Stay clear of non-green dry cleaners, beware of pesticides, rid your house of all chemicals. Diane needs to take a few more pictures. ‘How about Marin County? I have heard they have high breast cancer rates? Does anyone know why? Did the movie talk about that?’ I remember the three or four hot spots mentioned, with Marin being one of them. Even closer to home, is Bayview Hunter’s Point, one of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods, that happens to be built on highly contaminated grounds.

My new friend has information of her own that she wants to share with me. She just read a study that also links breast cancer to obesity. ‘Look at me, I have gained so much weight over this last year! It’s all stress. I need to walk more. What about bottled water? I have heard some chemicals seep through the plastic. What do you think?’ I suggest she installs a water purifier under her kitchen sink. Our fifteen minutes are over. She and I were just getting started. I give her the address for my green blog.

More and more, I am sharing my green self with strangers. Not lecturing. Just sharing what comes for me in every day situations, like at the clinic. Diane’s reaction is not atypical. I find that people are hungry for real, practical information, especially when it is delivered in a very personal manner. I tried to think about what has made these encounters successful, and I have come up with these few simple rules for green sharing:

1. Wait for the other person to initiate the conversation, e.g clerk at grocery store asks me if I want paper or plastic, when I am only buying one small item.

2. Share what is coming up for you in the situation: thoughts, feelings, images, memories: ‘I can’t possibly say yes to plastic bags, after this movie I saw about what the plastics are doing to the fish in the ocean’

3. Wait for the other person’s response

4. If they show interest, pick their interest further with more details, more interesting facts: ‘Yes, in this movie, ‘The Synthetic Sea’, they show how the plastics we throw into our garbage end up in the ocean, and gets degraded into tiny particles, that mimic the fish food. The fish end up eating the tiny plastics. etc

5. Go with the person, they may, by association, venture into different green territories that are more relevant to them.
6. Do not ever lecture, or give unsolicited advice.
7. Show your vulnerabilities, be real
8. Do not posture as a green do gooder who knows it all
9. Empathize with people’s personal difficulties, all the things that make it hard for folks to think and act green.
10. Take advantage of teaching moments; do not try to force feed a message wherever you go.

I would love to hear from other people’s stories of green sharing.

Please welcome Marguerite, a new guest writer at Groovy Green. From her blog:

Back in April 2007, I started this blog on a whim. I was getting annoyed by all the self righteousness in the green media. And I wanted to offer a counterpoint, my reality as a less than perfect Green Girl Wannabe, who just couldn’t get her act together. One ulterior motive was to conduct a psychological experiment, using myself as a subject, to look for insights into the key attitudes and behaviors that shaped my interactions with the environment. Part of the experiment has been a careful examination of my daily actions, thoughts, family interactions, feelings, and urges, from an environmental perspective. The other part has been the validation and refinement of my insights, thanks to the comments from all the dedicated people who have followed this blog. La Marguerite is a work in progress, a living thing that keeps on surprising me. It is becoming a zen, activist, psychological, business, philosophical, practical, humble green blog.

Halloween Horror:

My Little Sister wanted a Halloween Costume. I was told to go to Wal-Mart. Of course, we could have made the costume, but with only three hours a week together, plus my uncertain sewing skills, it did not seem like an option. Here we were, nearing the Wal-Mart parking lot. My heart sunk, at the sight of the huge expanse, still not big enough to hold all the cars. While waiting in line for a space, I had plenty of time to watch the endless flow in and out, of families going about their business of shopping, merchandise piled up high in their carts, no plastic bags spared, of course. I went into a place of doom. There is no way out of this mess. We have gone too far, and there is no going back. And I am no different from those people. Swept into a force too great to resist. Called convenience. Larisha could not contain her impatience. Eight years old, and getting a Halloween costume. “I will give Wal-Mart a million stars if they have my costume.”

I was torn, between my green conscience, growing louder, as we made our way towards the Halloween Costumes section at the end of the store, and my desire to please Larisha and to not disappoint her. They were right. Wal-Mart really is the place for Halloween Costumes. The racks were overflowing. Costumes were strewn all over the floor. Synthetics reigned, and although I did not check, I am ready to bet the goods had traveled far. Was I the only one there to feel so sick with guilt? Larisha had found a Bleeding Grim Reaper costume, complete with fake blood pump, scary plastic mask, and black polyester robe. She was ecstatic. The picture showed a plastic scythe. We had to go look for it in the next aisle. There it was, hidden under a pile of fake pitchforks. Mission accomplished, Larisha was all set for Halloween. She asked if she could call her older sister to share her excitement.

Once at the checkout counter, I thought of redeeming myself just a little, and declined the clerk’s offer of a plastic bag. The security person at the door looked at us suspiciously. We were carrying our merchandise in our arms. Had we stolen it? I walked out, with a feeling of defeat. Larisha, oblivious to my plight, was continuing to make small talk, and I tried to put on a good face. We were victorious, weren’t we? We were coming home with our trophy.

From: Marguerite Manteau-Rao
http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com