It's not easy being green

A friend and I were talking today, and she announced that she is sick of the "green movement". This proclamation quickly redirected me from an obsession with finding some good fettucine alfredo to a concern for her state of mind. This particular friend happens to be pretty darn earth/health/everything conscious. I thought maybe something real bad was happening, and the next thing she'd tell me was that she was embarking on a diet of beer and apple seeds, just to see what would happen. I had to intervene.

The best response I could muster in this instance, though, was a wide-eyed "WHY?!"

I tend to cave in sensitive situations.

She explained, and I was relieved to learn that she was not abandoning her long held ways. Instead she was lamenting that others have seemed to join the "green movement" as they would any popular new trend that has a corresponding television show. Her whole life she was taught to do the things people were now just discovering, and it was frustrating to her.

Once I determined she was not in fact abandoning her ways, and that she was going to be ok, I resumed my quest for fettucine alfredo, and having concluded my quest I set to thinking about what she had said. And eventually, I too became annoyed, but probably for different reasons. Or, maybe not.

Like any new cultural phenomenon, the green movement has profited from an unbelievable marketing campaign. In a sense, this is a really good thing. People at least have some consciousness about the ways in which their behaviors can impact the environment, for good or evil. There is an incredible amount of peer pressure being applied all over country to buy Prius's, use renewable shopping bags, and cut out processed foods. Everyone, it seems, is doing it. Like wearing Jordache jeans, eating at Friday's, or driving a BMW, there is a certain status associated with being as green as possible. Or, as green as you can comfortably be...

Generally I take issue with fads and trends, because like Brett Farve's retirement, they tend to start enthusiastically and end very quickly. I also take issue with them because they are only as popular as they are comfortable. When a movement starts to exact a toll on a person's comfort level, nine times out of ten that person will move on.

Being green isn't easy. Like most good and right things, it requires setting aside many of our luxuries, our "entitlements", and learning to live without, to live responsibly. And being responsible means that we have to spend an awful lot of time thinking about something other than our own comfort, our own wants, needs, and desires. We have to not care about what people think about the things we don't do and don't have. We have to let go of a whole way of thinking and living that tells us more is better. And we have to do this in a deeply real and authentic way.

For me, lots of people are claiming a concern for the environment as if it were a new thing, something they can pioneer until the next thing comes along. (Kind of like when everyone thought Bono discovered Africa, and everyone became an expert on the plight of her inhabitants.) I suspect that for many, spending an afternoon at Whole Foods using recycled bags that are then shoved into the back of a prius is a feel good moment. Remembering to take the Nalgene bottle and filling it up at the closest water fountain...another feel good moment. Composting? The darkest hue of the contemporary bourgeois' green-ness, and utter nirvana. Be sure to tell people about it...

For people who have lived their whole lives bucking the culture of want and trying to live the life of should, I would imagine this almost adolescent glee over the green movement would be frustrating. It is your way of life, turned trendy. It's your deepest beliefs and understandings about how we should be in the world slickified.

It's stopping the car to take a picture of the Amish family in their buggy.

There's something terribly depressing about that, because as has been mentioned, trends come and go. What was once the object of the trend becomes passe and dated. Laughable. Ignorable. Once the audience has tired and is clamoring to move on, demanding something else to spend their money on, looking for something else to satiate their need to be in and cool and hip, the marketing machine will work its magic and who knows, maybe in a few years paper mache will be all the rage.

For those who were green before green was cool, and for those who are truly transformed by their participation in such a movement, this is yet another storm to weather. The best that can be done is to keep on doing what you have been doing, help others to do the same, and hope that this particular social epoch ranks as the longest lasting trend in the history of the world.