Ever Greener

Our family attends a Unitarian Universalist church. Today the lay leaders who created and delivered the service and sermon talked about making ecologically sound choices, and what motivates one to do that. Their point was that fear and guilt don't work well for most of us as motivating forces, and that in order to bring about transformative change, in order to really start living greener, many of us will need a more positive motivator: love, and a personal relationship with the earth that transcends the abstract "I love nature, being out in nature, watching the sunset or the waterfall or the [fill in the blank]" idealized version of nature. Instead, the lay leaders suggested, let's develop a love relationship with the earth that is more akin to the way you love your child or your pet, whereby you make odious sacrifices like waking up in the night to feed your child or let your dog out, over and over again, because you love this person or entity.

Interesting idea.

The reason why fear and guilt don't work well enough for me as motivating forces to Do Right By The Earth is because I am deeply uncomfortable with feeling fearful and guilty, and so when I start to feel overly guilty and overly fearful, I try to escape those feelings by putting my head in the sand and just living my normal (read: not-as-green-as-could-be) life. I have the luxury, for now, of putting my ecological footprint out of my head when I so choose, and of just raising my kids, going to work, getting through my day. Not uncommon.

But what if I were to make a conscious choice to take care of the earth as if it were my child or my pet? The stewardship that accompanies love, rather than guilt or fear, might mean longer-lasting resolutions that could actually become truly ingrained habits, not dreaded chores that I forget or drop after a short while.

My friend Maiaoming writes a blog called Cville Working Moms, and several months ago she posted an essay called It's Not Easy Being Green in which she ran through some hot-button eco-issues and how she thinks she fares in each area. Stuff like the use of plastic bags, plastic water bottles, disposable vs. cloth diapers, etc. Thinking about her list, and thinking about today's sermon, and reviewing my own green and not-so-green habits, I realize that I really do have deeply ingrained habits of greenness when the issue packs an emotional wallop for me, like eating vegetarian or buying stuff used rather than adding to consumer demand for new mass-produced crap made by semi-enslaved peoples in other countries.

But I'm less consistent with the stuff that's more vague to me, where the consequences are harder for me to see or understand -- like using compact fluorescents vs. incandescent bulbs, or the energy efficiency ratings on large appliances. When I can deeply understand the impact of my choice, and when it's something that means a lot to me emotionally, I don't have to be reminded to do what I theoretically think is right. I don't have to go through mental acrobatics to decide each mealtime whether or not to bite into the flesh of an animal. I have a visceral response to that idea that causes me not to even recognize most animal proteins as food. My eye scans over it like the average omnivore's eye scans over cans of pet food in the pantry. You don't even think of it as food. It's not really an issue. You just do what you do, and you can't really imagine it any other way.

I'd like to make the right choices that automatically in other areas of my life too, like buying bulk foods, using canvas bags instead of plastic, riding my bike more instead of taking the car. I'm not there yet, but I aspire to get there.

I guess what I'm realizing is that I'll need to do three things to become more effective at reducing my ecological footprint: One, I'll need to educate myself more about the implications of the vast array of lifestyle choices that I know will impact the environment but the details of which I don't really understand yet, and two, I'll need to connect with the Earth as a living entity so that I can internalize my new resolutions in a more personal, less abstract way. For example, when I turn down the burger, I see the big brown-eyed cow whose flesh I'm not eating. When I buy a big piece of plastic baby equipment at Goodwill, I see that much space not being taken up in a landfill. I'll need to better understand the repercussions of the other choices (conscious and not) that I make every day, so that doing the right thing will feel less like an eye-rolling guilt thing, or a politically correct thing, as I admit it sometimes does for me --- and more like a set of choices I make because of my passion and my true, deep understanding of the effects of those choices. I want to ride the bus the way I eschew meat. I want to embrace the sacrifices that it will take for me to make the next set of environmentally correct lifestyle choices. I want them not to feel so much like sacrifices, the way nursing my daughter when she cries at 6am doesn't (usually) feel like (too much of) a sacrifice. It's just what you do when you love someone, something. Yeah, the guilt and the fear plays a part (even sometimes with my choices about my kids, my husband, and so on) but hopefully my main motivators are compassion, empathy, love, and the sense of duty that comes from that love. So may it be with my relationship with the earth.

If you, too, are making conscious choices to become ever greener, what motivates you? What keeps you going when the sacrifices feel too much like, well, sacrifices? What gets you back on track when you go astray with your resolutions?