What we’re up against

Whenever I feel a little too comfortable in my treehugger social bubble, I need only look as far as my condo complex to give myself a good slap in the face. There are recyclables in the trash…pretty much every time. There is trash in the recycle bin…pretty much every time. The dryers are going full blast when it’s 95 degrees outside, and my downstairs neighbors regularly take 20 minute showers as if the Californian drought were pure fantasy. But today — wow, today was a whole new level of clueless, American entitlement at work.

I’m so astounded by what I observed today that I drew you a picture.

Here’s the explanation. This family lives on a ground unit with a door that opens out on their covered parking spot, where they keep a big gray truck. To do laundry, they put it in the truck, drive it less than 50 feet down to the laundry room, double park, and leave their engine running while they go put their laundry in. Then they back up to their spot and double park it again. A little later, they drive up again to retrieve the washed and dried laundry. They are neither disabled nor old.

(Feel free to interject “WTF??!” at any point here.)

Kevin had to point out what they were doing because it would never, ever have occurred to me that even the most clueless American would do something so phenomenally…I don’ t even know how to describe it. Lazy? Thoughtless? Self-absorbed? Unsustainable? American?

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect they’re a lot closer to the standard American family than Kevin and I are. It’s not just them; it’s an attitude problem that most of America has. It’s the attitude that I’m free to do whatever is easiest, cheapest, and best for me regardless of the costs to other people, species, and ecosystems. That the long term viability of our resources doesn’t matter in the face of present abundance. That I deserve to be able to do my laundry like a bastard because I can. 

This is what the environmental movement is really up against. Be afraid.

Why you shouldn’t tell an environmentalist to ‘choose life’

Over the weekend, I saw two things that really pissed me off:

and

Hi. I’m one of those nutty left wing liberals you fear hate. And I’d like to remind you of a couple things. You’re telling us to choose life, yet most of us (death choosers?) are passionately against the death sentence. Most of us are anti-war, especially unnecessary wars that have cost us obscene amounts of life, energy, and money. Plenty of us are vegetarians or vegans because we don’t limit the definition or value of life to humans. I’d say that pretty much all of us are interested in preserving life where it has connections and quality, even when that means prioritizing the lives of adult women over a small cluster of fertilized cells.

From an environmental perspective, we’re not talking about a couple of babies versus a couple of trees. Environmentalism is about choosing life over increasing ocean acifidication, loss of habitat, fresh water shortages, and massive extinctions of both plants and animals. (And hey — we’re on the food chain, too. Being at the top just means being the last to starve.) We choose to preserve the life of our planet because our own species, as well as every other species, depends wholly upon it.

For us, choosing life means caring about things beyond our immedate lives and species. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that a growing human population is not going to be compatible with a future world that we want to live in, maybe even a future world we can all live in. Contraception and education, and to a lesser extent the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, are necessary components to our long term ability to live sustainably and thrive on this planet.

Treehuggers choose life all the time, every day, in everything we do to lead greener and lower impact lives. We just do it on a larger, longer, and perhaps less anthropocentric scale than you do. (And what do you do to choose life, other than take away reproductive rights from women?)

Tell us to choose life? I don’t think it means what you think it means.