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For ‘EcoMoms,’ Saving Earth Begins at Home
Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
… Move over, Tupperware. The EcoMom party has arrived, with its ever-expanding “to do” list that includes preparing waste-free school lunches; lobbying for green building codes; transforming oneself into a “locovore,” eating locally grown food; and remembering not to idle the car when picking up children from school (if one must drive). Here, the small talk is about the volatile compounds emitted by dry-erase markers at school.
Perhaps not since the days of “dishpan hands” has the household been so all-consuming. But instead of gleaming floors and sparkling dishes, the obsession is on installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, buying in bulk and using “smart” power strips that shut off electricity to the espresso machine, microwave, X-Box, VCR, coffee grinder, television and laptop when not in use.
… Part “Hints from Heloise” and part political self-help group, the alliance, which Ms. Pinkson says has 9,000 members across the country, joins a growing subculture dedicated to the “green mom,” with blogs and Web sites like greenandcleanmom.blogspot.com and eco-chick.com. Web-based organizations like the Center for a New American Dream in Takoma Park, Md., advocate reducing consumption and offer a registry that helps brides “celebrate the less-material wedding of your dreams.”
At an EcoMom circle in Palo Alto, executive mothers whipped out spreadsheets to tally their goals, inspired by a 10-step program that urges using only nontoxic products for cleaning, bathing and make-up, as well as cutting down garbage by 10 percent.
“I used to feel anxiety,” said Kathy Miller, 49, an alliance member, recalling life before she started investigating weather-sensitive irrigation controls for her garden with nine growing zones. “Now I feel I’m doing something.”
The notion of “ecoanxiety” has crept into the culture here. It was the subject of a recent cover story in San Francisco magazine that quotes a Berkeley mother so stressed out about the extravagance of her nightly baths that she started to reuse her daughter’s bath water. Where there is ecoanxiety, of course, there are ecotherapists.
“The truth is, we’re not living very naturally,” said Linda Buzzell, a therapist in Santa Barbara who publishes the quarterly EcoTherapy News and often holds sessions in her backyard permaculture food forest. “We’re in our cars, staring at the computer screen, separated most of the day from the people we love.”
“Activism can help counteract depression,” Ms. Buzzell added. “But if we get caught up in trying to save the world single-handedly, we’re just going to burn out.”
… Women have been instrumental in the environmental movement from the start, including their involvement in campaigns a century ago to save the Palisades along the Hudson River and sequoias in California and, more recently, Lois Gibbs’s fight against toxic waste at Love Canal.
In public opinion surveys, women express significantly higher levels of environmental concern than men, said Riley Dunlap, a professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University.
Lately “local lifestyle activism,” much of it driven by women, has been on the rise and is likely to continue, Dr. Dunlap said. “Just belonging to a national environmental organization, which seemed effective in the 1970s and ’80s, doesn’t work anymore, particularly in an era of government unresponsiveness,” he said.
(16 February 2008)
Pleasures
Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance
I confess, until I started rioting, I was one of those people who liked to think in the shower. When you have four children, a shower has magic powers – it makes a cone of silence around you. It warms you when you are cold, it cools you when you are hot. And until I started paying attention to my water usage, I showered a lot – it was a self-indulgent pleasure. While we’re not actually keeping our water usage down to the 90% reduction – we can do it, but we don’t like it and we’re not in a water short place, so we’ve gone up to a more comfortable 70% – there is still the hot water to deal with.
The funny thing is that when I began to cut back to shorter and cooler and less frequent showers, I didn’t mind it that much. The only time I missed long hot showers was on the first day of my cycles, when I could remember how much pleasure I got from hot water against my back, easing my cramps. And for a while, I grumped around for a bit over the fact that I no longer took morning showers, or long hot showers at all.
And then it occurred to me that I could have my first-day-of-the-cycle shower if I wanted – I just had to shorten the other ones. So this month I did that. I skipped one extra shower a week, and shortened my other ones slightly. And a few days ago, I stood in the water in the morning, blissfully contemplating how good it felt that hot water on my back.
But it didn’t just feel good. It felt *GREAT* – all day long I felt wonderful. And it struck me that this is the payback for all the scrimping and conserving we do – the transformation of ordinary comforts into a delight.
We get this too with our small percentage of non-local food. We buy a very few non-local fruits and vegetables each week. And each week, my husband and the children choose carefully – what shall we have? One week it was mangos, and none of us have ever tasted anything so delicious as those juicy, dripping yellow fruits.
(16 February 2008)
Generation Green taking on parents to help them save the planet
Canadian Press
Marika Martin is a vegetarian. So is her husband, Charles Gonzalez, who rides his bicycle to work every day in New York City traffic, rain or shine.
The couple cares deeply about the environment, but if you ask their kids, 12-year-old Sinika and eight-year-old Soren, it’s sometimes not deeply enough.
“My hopeless mother is obsessed with plastic bags,” said Soren, a third-grader and huge fan of Al Gore’s global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
“A lot of plastic can’t be recycled,” chimed in his sister, who’s in Grade 7. “The turtles can get suffocated and it can go into the water. My dad gave her a cloth bag but she doesn’t use it. Plastic drives me nuts!”
Say hello to Generation Green. They’re young, well-researched and mad as heck – inspired by an outpouring of movies, TV shows, books, websites and “green classes” at school. They’ve been learning how to save the planet since toddlerhood, and they’re taking on their parents to do more, do better.
While some parents fret that the pop culture tidal wave amounts to environmental indoctrination, others are looking for ways to accommodate their kids – and compromise when the price tag or the convenience factor come into play.
“I get it, I get it, I’m a bag lady,” Martin said of her plastic-wrapped groceries. “But I’m always doing spontaneous shopping so it’s hard. It isn’t always feasible. Of course it’s making me feel guilty. I know I shouldn’t use them but in everyday living it’s hard.”
…Compromise is key, said Julie Ross, a parent and family therapist in New York who has written three books on child-rearing.
Not every family can afford to install solar panels, but they can put on a sweater and turn down the thermostat, she suggested. If a new car isn’t in the budget, a hybrid is out of the question, but carpooling to school or turning off the car rather than idling when stopped in the pickup line might work. Some parents think composting toilets are way too big a hassle, but they’re willing to share a flush.
…How to manage an eco-warrior kid
Parents faced with the challenges of raising eco-warrior kids just need to take a little time to process their concerns, says Julie Ross, a family therapist in New York.
Keep the acronym RRAC in mind, for Respect, Research, Acknowledge, Compromise:
-Respect your child’s point of view by listening.
-Research (if necessary) your environmental options if you can’t say “yes” to a request.
-Acknowledge with pride your child’s desire to create change.
-Compromise when possible by taking “baby steps” towards a mutual goal.
(11 February 2008)
Going green for 80 cents a day
Marian Wilkinson, Sydney Morning Herald
FOR the cost of a daily local phone call, Australians could cut their greenhouse gas emissions to the same ambitious levels now being considered by the most advanced European countries, an economic study has found.
The report by the management consultants McKinsey and Company, advisers to some of the world’s biggest corporations and institutions, says that by 2020 Australia could cut its greenhouse emissions to 30 per cent below 1990 levels for a cost of less than 80 cents a day for each household – or $290 per year. Over the same period household income is expected to rise by more than $20,000 per year.
The cuts could be made without a big technological breakthrough or dramatic lifestyle changes, the report finds, and by 2030, emissions could be slashed up to 60 per cent.
“This is not daydreaming. This is a fact-based analysis aimed at setting the goal posts,” one of the report’s authors, Stephan Gorner, told the Herald.
The report, An Australian Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction, pre-empts the Federal Government’s own studies on the cost of cutting greenhouse gases by Ross Garnaut and the Treasury. Professor Garnaut is not due to release a draft of his report until June and yesterday the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, said his department’s modelling would not be available until then.
(15 February 2008)
