It Isn't Easy Being Green

Kermit really nailed it when he said it isn’t easy being green.  But then again he was addressing the race question.  Lately I’ve been thinking about a whole different kind of being green.

            Today, “being green” means being environmentally conscious - a technical term meaning don’t waste stuff.  Our grandmothers used to call this being “frugal” but how tedious is that?   Back then it wasn’t a choice.  It was a lifestyle dictated by a lack of funds.  It was essential to be careful with your stuff - you didn’t go overboard using stuff, buying stuff, or throwing stuff away.  Now we have so much stuff we find it hard to appreciate any of it.  And stuff is soooo easy to come by.  Wal-Mart and the internet are chock full of stuff that is guaranteed to make us happy.

            Yet, at every turn we are encouraged to be “green”. We now have Greenpeace and The Green Party where once upon a time we only had The Jolly Green Giant. You can see how much more solemn things have become.  And why was The Giant green anyway?  Was he the product of the first misguided genetics experiment that crossed radioactive broccoli with humans?  Or did he climb down a beanstalk and decide he liked farming and advertising?  Or possibly, his excessive height just made him seasick from bobbing around in high altitude winds as he ho-ho-ho’d over various agricultural operations.  I don’t think he had any personal policies on “greenness” at all.  I suspect he might have even used pesticides.  But there must have been some reason he was so Jolly.  Maybe he grew things other than vegetables. 

            Greenpeace and The Green Party are not at all Jolly.  They are pretty serious, and have members who go around with the perpetually furrowed brows of the disapproving.  Maybe if they spent more time on farms and in gardens they too would be Jolly.  It would certainly be healthier than perpetrating endless acts of fruitless persuasion.

            At one time, back before anyone even thought up the idea of being green, it was all just taken for granted.  Recycling hadn’t been invented, at least not technically.  My dad, who didn’t live long enough to witness the birth of recycling as a political act, was nevertheless a dedicated recycler.  Every time he took a load to the dump, he helped them out by bringing more back with him than he had dropped off.  Today he would be arrested.  It would be illegal for him to make boat seats out of chairs with missing legs, wrong to bring home a millstone and turn it into the world’s biggest grindstone, and immoral to pick up that discarded wooden barrel that later housed such lovely flowers.  I’m almost glad he didn’t live into the era where he would have become an offender.  The mere thought of it makes me shudder – my own dear dad arrested for beauifying things that other people threw away. 

            Now, going to the dump involves a lot of rule following.  You and your vehicle must be weighed before you rid yourself of that bag of stinking meat that was fouling up your fridge.  The dump is so regulated that after you hurl your bag of meat into the appointed spot and drive away holding your nose, you and your vehicle must be weighed again.  It’s the municipal version of Weight Watchers.  The dump uses different scales for vehicles entering and exiting.  If your vehicle should ever weigh more on the outbound leg of your trip, a frightening situation could unfold.  They might tear apart your vehicle seeking the contraband garbage that you had squirreled away under the back seat.  Theft from a store is called “shrinkage”.  It will get you arrested.  You’re not allowed to shrink a landfill site either. 

            Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your greenness on the home front.  Our most recent endeavor was an energy saving showerhead.  I must admit that it did indeed save energy.  During a seven-minute shower, it grudgingly squeezed out about a cup of water.  My feet didn’t even get damp.  A day with one hundred percent humidity would have yielded a more suitable environment in which to work up a lather.  I smelled like a shampoo sample until mid afternoon.  And all the water I didn’t use lapped around in the hot water tank all day, doing no one any good.

            The downside of being green is that it can spawn conflict.  Suppose I read by candlelight in order to save energy.  Am I perhaps doing more damage by releasing carbon into the atmosphere with the candle flame?  Can I expect someone to ring the doorbell and slap me with a carbon tax?  And once I’ve saved that electricity just exactly where is it?  Does it get put aside as my own personal kilowatt hour, or does some other less conscientious person get to run his plasma screen TV with it? 

            So maybe, in some cases, we should take our example of how to be “green” from Kermit and The Jolly Green Giant.  They are the experts on greenness, and you can bet they are never, ever going to be as cranky as Greenpeace!  Butting other people’s ships and engineering high seas confrontations are not on their list of Green Things To Do.  And I’m pretty sure that despite how helpful it is to the environment, neither of them is ever going to endorse showering in a mere cup of water!

BYOB - Redefined!

Remember when BYOB meant Bring Your Own Booze or maybe Bring Your Own Beer - depending on how fiscally advanced your friends were? Now it’s way more boring. It means Bring Your Own Bag.

Originally, BYOB was invented to help keep your buddies out of the poor house when you all wanted to get drunk together. The current purpose? Lining the pockets of grocery store magnates. Oh sure five cents for a plastic bag is nothing. After all, what else can you do with a nickel these days? Penny candy costs ten cents! And, yes, even a whole bunch of grocery bags is only going to set you back fifty or sixty cents. But that’s not the point. I don’t think grocery stores are buying those bags for five cents each, so I smell profit being cooked up. In fact, now that we have the Internet, and nothing can be kept secret, I’ve discovered that those bags cost way less than one cent each. So that’s at least 400% profit on every bag sold. With a money-making scheme like that, grocery stores will probably stop bothering to pedal food at all.

Customers are only too happy to pay for those bags, figuring that they’re helping the environment. But…if I previously required ten bags to bring home my groceries, and now I need ten bags plus 50 cents to bring home my groceries, how am I helping the environment? In fact, I have consumed even more resources with this method. Somebody had to mine/smelt/manufacture/transport those coins I used as payment, or invent and supervise the cyberworld required to process the equivalent digital transactions. And they all drove to work in their SUV’s.

So, in my desperate attempt to help the environment, I am now transporting ratty moth-eaten plastic bags in my purse, pockets, and under my bra strap - so that I can save a few nickels. Frankly, it makes me feel cheap. But if I buy the bags I feel un-green. I also suspect that I’ve been mercilessly gouged by corporations that have figured out how to squeeze a few more shekels out of the environmentally guilt-ridden.

Cloth bags would seem to be the ultimate solution. So… in addition to used plastic bags, I tote my largish collection of reusable bags with me everywhere I go. They’re much bulkier and can’t be stuck into convenient nooks and crannies like the plastic ones.

The grocery moguls expressed their concern for the environment by helpfully selling me the cloth bags at a dollar a piece. They would like me to use them for a long time, but not too long a time. I can tell this because while they are made of cloth, they’re not washing machine friendly. A few rounds in the washer and they’ve become pathetically bearded with lint balls. Oh well. At least I can’t see the E. coli frolicking in last week’s meat juice/produce nectar.

But still I worry. While I’m not wasting plastic by bringing home an estimated 1000 bags per year, I am sucking up energy by putting them through the wash. So, basically, trying to be green is a painful equation that can never be satisfactorily balanced.

Of course I could always give up buying food altogether.