Green choices, green voices

Mood: alert

Listening to: Brett Dennen

I've just come off a weekend spent staining this woodshed we built on the property this summer. We used an oil-based stain from a leading manufacturer, and it proved a nasty experience. Despite wearing a filter mask and wearing gloves and a long-sleeved shirt, I spent most of Sunday inhaling chemical fumes and wiping brown gunk off my skin. Painting with this stuff was like painting with water. To get enough on your brush, you pretty much can't avoid trailing drops behind you, and if you have to reach over shoulder height, it runs up your brush handle and into your sleeve.

The can offered the usual dyspeptic fine print text of instructions and warnings, with a curt mention that this stuff is carcinogenic in mice. Imagine how much fun it was to gash my scalp on the protruding corner of a roof beam I'd just painted.

I got to thinking: why the hell are we using this stuff in the first place? Surely nowadays we can find something less toxic. We don't have to use petroleum products for our home, and we shouldn't, if we can help it, use stuff we don't want to breathe or get on our skin. Or more properly, stuff that makes us nervous, stuff we know isn't a great idea for the environment. Stuff we wouldn't want in our water.

Those thoughts moved me to consider how common it is for us to fill our lives with harmful chemicals and take it for granted, even when, as in our case, we're trying to make more sustainable choices in our purchases and our energy footprint. I accept that as part of a highly networked industrial society, we, as citizens and consumers, cannot wholly avoid toxic products. Most of us use gasoline, for instance, or ethanol, which does not come from a clean manufacturing process (it burns coal). We use tools made in factories with material from steel foundaries, plastics manufacturers, numerous other sources. Economies of scale and the ubiquitous use of toxins in the production cycle mean nobody escapes exposure. It's naive to think anyone can entirely escape the use of toxic materials without being so far off the grid that you're knapping your own tools.

Still, we're in a great time for going green. Green products are still more expensive, but as the business sector continues to wake up to the potential of clean, sustainable practices, choices will continue to expand for people who want to minimize the negative impact on our water, air, soil, and bodies.

Within minutes, we were able to find a product on the web that met all our criteria for safety and performance. Sure, we'll pay more. I'm aware that the price points for green products are often higher at this stage. We're fortunate enough to be able to afford it. It's a shame that you have to pay more for goods that are good for you--compare the price of most junk food versus that of organic or low-fat food. I think people have to try to make the best choices they can afford, whether picking to go green on, working something organic into their diets, buying the water-based product instead of the oil-based one, choosing paper bags over plastic, or getting a crank-charged flashlight instead of one with the fist-sized battery. More than that, being a green consumer means cultivating an awareness of the impact of one's purchasing choices. And the impact of one's use choices.

I remember when I started my third year in law school. A group of us went out to 6th Street Grill for a late night nosh and beer. A first-year woman, a 1L in the law school parlance, glibly bragged that she changed the oil in her car herself and just poured the used oil into the gutter. I jolted as though I'd received an electric shock.

"What do you mean you poured it down the gutter?" I asked. "Don't you know how bad that is for the water?"

"But it's just a quart or two of oil," she replied, taken aback. "That's not much. It doesn't matter."

"No way. It's still bad for the environment, even in small amounts, and when thousands of people do the same, it adds up. You want this stuff in your water?" I was incredulous that she seemed so ignorant of the notion of aggregation, but what she said next blew my mind.

"So what? Even if we all die, Earth will continue. Life will continue in some form."

"Are you kidding? You're saying it's OK for us to poison ourselves because a million years from now cockroaches are still around?"

She repeated, "Earth will continue--"

"By that logic," I cut in, "it doesn't matter if someone breaks our necks right here, right? Because ten years from now there will still be people on the earth."

"Or cockroaches," added a friend next to me.

"Or cockroaches," I said, with a smile I didn't feel.

Thinking over this conversation fourteen years later, I'm struck by how much this young woman simply didn't want to believe her choices of convenience had any consequences. Toxins just go out into the world and nature handles it. Cancer just happens. It's somebody else's problem. Who cares, because in geologic time, the discreet event of someone dumping used engine oil in the street is a micro-blip. That model of thinking reduces basically everything to meaninglessness, which means any action can be justified, any choice is defensible with a shrug and a roll of the eyes.

In some ways, there's a parallel between this disconnect from the awareness of accumulated choices at the aggregate level and the claim of certain dispirited citizens that it's pointless to vote because "my vote is too small and doesn't matter."

Oddly enough, I suspect this view has permeated American consumer culture for a long time. The moral of the story is: vote with your dollar. Educate yourself about consequences. Realize that individual choices matter, in the home, in the community, the nation, and the global marketplace. They add up to a voice.