- submitted by L. Keenan on 05/13/2008
In the 'Burbs, You're Not As Green As You Think You Are
By Linda Keenan
I'll put the question plainly. Can you live in the suburbs and still be Green? I'm just going to take a massive, generalizing leap and say, no, probably not. Or at least you are not as Green as you think you are.
I remember a few years ago meeting a woman who wore her Green credentials like a beauty pageant sash. This is when I lived in an exurb, a place with no sidewalks. I had remarked that our local ice cream store was two-tenths of a mile away and that I would love to walk there with my little boy, but I considered it too dangerous, sans sidewalks. She looked at me like I was suggesting I wanted to run a three-legged Boston Marathon: walk? You want to...whaddyou say? Walk?
She also made it abundantly clear that she viewed her exurban living as "clean" and "green," as opposed to the urban living that I had come from, and was still pining for. I will concede to her that our environment was literally green, surely helped along by massive amounts of Earth-destroying additives, compared to city-life. If you see something green in the East Village, you probably want to step far away from it.
And then I thought to myself: who has the bigger carbon footprint here? For 10-plus years, I lived in 450 square feet of space with my then-boyfriend, now husband and baby-daddy. When you live in 450 square feet, you can't accumulate much stuff. I'm not a buyer of stuff anyway, but even if I was, where would I put it? Then there are utilities. How much does it cost to heat 80-something apartments stacked together? A helluva lot less than 80 McMansions.
During those 10-plus years, I didn't drive once. In fact, my drivers' license had lapsed and I had to take the test again when I moved, you guessed it, to the suburbs. In my city years, I ate out mostly at restaurants and this was well before the day of computing carbon miles on your food, so probably I warrant a bunch of demerits there. Or do I? When you think about it, restaurant cooking is arguably more efficient energy-wise, depending on the establishment, than 8 million hungry souls cooking for themselves.
Now I live in one of the most walkable suburbs in America, according to the Brookings Institution, and finally, with the weather nice, I've begun to reap the benefits of that. But my neighbors seem to have missed the memo about that walkable thing.
We chose our house to be close to town and train. We live on the main drag leading to the train. You pretty much have to walk by our house to get there. And we're home to see all the walkers. There are so few of them my husband and I have names for the most notables: Gray-Braid Lady, and Bow-Tie Guy.
People do walk around in our town, but when it comes to the workaday chores of life, food shopping (even small purchases), pharmacy-going, all of that is still done with a car. I never see more than a few kids (if that) walking to middle school even though we are less than a half-mile away.
We also have a state-of-the-art recycling center that has been modeled around the world (there's no trash pickup in my town). I commend all the folks for the recycling there, but whenever I go, I'm amazed by the huge cars that pull up and the boxes on top of boxes on top of boxes that are to be thrown out. Some of the boxes used to house the Green-friendly products that have become an enormous industry, products that allow the ravenous American consumer to keep consuming, while purporting to be mini-Al Gores. Does it really matter that much to recycle the box when you keep accumulating more and more and more?
There is also a free garage sale area at this center, where people drop off unwanted items, and they are also to be applauded for dropping them off for other people to use (like me!), rather than dropping them in the trash. But the amount of barely-used discarded stuff simply staggers the mind.
I'm hardly pious about the environment. In fact, it's one of those issues I have never been able to care about passionately, or care about at all, to be perfectly frank, and no amount of viewings of "Inconvenient Truth" has changed that.
But I've begun to realize that I don't have to care, because by temperament and plain-old cheapness, I live a spare existence, by American standards at least, and with that, I know I set a model of Green living for my son. Because when I read that one pound-plus Vanity Fair Green issue, with endless ads of Green-certified products to buy, I do it at the library, ignore the ads, put it back on the shelf, and walk home.
Linda Keenan is a contributing writer at Burbia. Linda worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV. She now writes satire, primarily about parenting culture, at Thoroughly Modern Mommy. ...read more rants
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