Action for our environment

Rose-coloured glasses are so yesterday. Today, being “hip” and “with it” denotes green glasses, or better yet, sight greened without external paraphernalia. All the cool people choose the Toyota Prius as their first car. All hipsters, no matter how perfectly manicured their nails, play in the dirt by composting, or vermicomposting if they don’t have yards. Every touring artist out there is working hard to ensure their tour bus runs only on biodiesel, or better yet, vegetable oil recycled from any number of tacky fast food restaurants.  So what’s keeping you?

Often when it comes to discussing environmentally-friendly practices, lifestyle choices, and easy measures anyone can take, the overwhelming feeling of “I am so behind everyone else” runs rampant, taunting those who honestly are doing their best, starting from scratch, and slowly implementing practices from the ground up. Certainly it’s wonderful to see groups and individuals who adopted supposedly cutting-edge (but really long existing and available) practices years ago, but if you’re just starting today, you deserve congratulations on your first steps, not eye-rolling or downward glares because you weren’t around yesterday.

It’s upsetting the the people you’d often expect to the be the friendliest and most cooperative, the environmental advocates, sometimes morph into holier-than-thou fundamentalists simply because they were into fluorescent light bulbs back in the 20th century. “Oh, you’re becoming a vegan now?” they’ll say with an annoyingly superior lilt in their voices. “That’s so great, and after all, you’re only a block away from that trendy new all-vegan restaurant!” As if we need our life choices qualified by trends touted in hip, edgy zines.

Please don’t misunderstand — it is absolutely fantastic that becoming more environmentally-friendly is indeed a growing trend and more people are participating in one way or another. But the semantics of this statement radiate more danger that is immediately apparent, as the connotations of “trend” (except in an economist’s world) are far too close to “hip” than “exponential.” Environmental action is worth doing for its own sake, not for approval, and certainly not as a path to wide recognition.  I don’t care whether you idolize Julia Butterfly Hill or not; if you’re going to sit in that tree, do it because you don’t want to see ancient forests fall and not because you’ll win favour with the local conservation advocate group you so desire favour from.

That said, don’t follow a “trend” — be it a trendy trend or a quantified growth trend — without educating yourself first. Blind allegiance may set you on the right path, but that’s just luck, luck without a shred of effort involved.  In my day job, I see press releases and statements issued all the time retracting allegations made days earlier, or worse, announcing the shelving of a plan that seemed too good to be true (but still true!) when first issued. As an example, take bioenergy: no more fossil fuels and energy independence, you say? How can that possibly be dangerous? Ask yourself where the crops for cellulosic ethanol come from. Crops need to grow, right? And don’t monoculture plantations require physical space on the earth, space that may have been naturally forested before being razed for corn? (These are questions still being debated — no one has the answer just yet. But why not get in on the thinking?)

When I was little, every time I discovered an act that helped something or someone without negatively affecting the actor, I used to pester my mother as to why it wasn’t as common as it should be. “Why doesn’t everybody donate their organs?” I once asked. “It’s so simple and you’re dead, so you don’t need them anymore!” Of course, my child self didn’t take negating factors like religious beliefs or alternatives, such as donating your body to science for research into the very diseases making organ transplants necessary.

There are choices we can make every day to help the environment that don’t require endless internal debate. Bring a reusable mug with you to your favourite coffee shop. Use both sides of every sheet of paper whenever possible. Wash your clothes in cold water (which is every bit as good as hot!) to conserve energy and invest in a clothesline for sweet summer sun-drying.

But if you have a perfectly rideable bike that happens to be linked to a large manufacturer with a less-than-stellar environmental record and at the same time it seems like everyone you know is buying a bike from the new 100%-recycled store up the street that not only uses solar power but gives day or even hour jobs to the homeless, why are you following the trend? Yes, it’s great to support local independents, and it’s even better if these independents engage in positive, sustainable practices, but no one’s telling you to waste! Remember that one of the core Rs is “reuse” and wait until you need a new bike.

Here at Indyish, I’ve been working on a document detailing different options for environmentally-preferable printing. Recycled paper, ancient forest friendly paper, third party-certified chain of custody suppliers… It would have been easy to simply list the options and I could have had that done in an hour. But I focused on explaining why I listed what I listed as beneficial was, indeed, beneficial. You can always search for different options online, in books, or within the collective mind of a group of friends in minutes. But to understand, that’s a different story.

That’s what I hope the next “big trend” in environmental action will be.