green stuff

My name is Karen and I am an auto-environmentalist.

This simply means I don't care about how conservation or preservation or recycling or precycling will help to save the world. I only care about how it will help me. I'm here to tell you that following a strict policy of environmental self-interest is an amazingly practical way to live. It's not a bad way to raise a family, either. In fact, it was one of those special "parenting moments" that turned me into an avowed auto-environmentalist in the first place.

No, it wasn’t cradling a precious newborn in my arms that made me want to buy myself a leotard and join the Planeteers. It was a chilling moment some sixteen years later, while doing the fifth load of laundry in three days, holding in my hands my son’s yellow tee-shirt, the one with “Let’s Hug It Out” in faded letters across the front. I had seen this tee-shirt before, exactly two loads ago. Why was I washing it again, drying it again, and folding it again—when I didn’t remember seeing him wear it in the first place?

It seems he'd put it on one morning, changed his mind about wearing it, and tossed it into the hamper instead of putting it back in his drawer. Didn't seem like a big deal, he said to me when I asked "What the @#$#% are you doing, buster?" Look. I don't care if we were all lazy, inconsiderate teenagers once. I'm getting scoliosis from hunching over mountains of laundry day after day while he's trying on and tossing off shirts until he lands on the one that brings out the blue in his eyes? Homey don't think so.

The day of my epiphany was special. Life-altering, paradigm-shifting, game-changing special. One moment I was wondering like a dimbulb why I was holding that shirt and the next my life took on a focus so sharp it could take your eye out. Seriously.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Al Gore is a self-righteous stiff and I’d step in front of a moving bus before I would describe myself as an environmentalist. And I reject anything marketed to me as “green” or “eco-friendly.” That stuff is for suckers and the folks who are selling it to you are laughing all the way to the off-shore accounts where they stow their mattresses full of green money. How’s that for an inconvenient truth?

I’m just a born-again kitchen table conservationist with a moral obligation to change how my own little family operates. To raise the one child I’ve got to think about where things come from, what happens when we use them, where they go when we’re done with them. To know exactly why he does or buys or uses something. And to quit standing in front of the open feckin’ refrigerator looking for desirable snack options that AREN’T THERE.

We don't recycle in my house to help reduce the size of that putrid landfill we drive past when we go to the airport in New Jersey. We (by "we," of course, I mean Mr. Let's Hug It Out himself) take those empty bottles and cans back to the grocery store for all those shiny nickels that add up to crisp dollars that won't put a dent in the tuition bill we'll be receiving from the lucky university that has agreed to take him off our hands next year.

See what I mean? Quit worrying about how your using less electricity will help the people of some village whose name you can't pronounce that's in some country you wouldn't visit if someone paid you cash money. I promise you, they're not worrying about you right now. You've got your own problems, friend, and if you can find ways to solve them playing the environmental angle, hey, you may just walk off with your own Nobel Prize. A girl can dream, can't she?