A friend of mine once tried to describe my family to her friend. She explained we work oxen, and keep chickens, and grow much of our own food and bake bread in a wood stove.
“Sound like hippies,” my friend’s friend said.
“Not really,” my friend said. “More like post-punk do-it-yourselfers.”
Well, neither label is particularly appropriate. And both make us sound like we’re living some life that we aren’t.
The trouble with labels is that they generally allow you to dismiss whole categories of people, and with it, anything you might think they stand for or do. I’ve never been all that black-or-white about anything.
Yes, I guess we are do-it-yourselfers, at least when we can do it. And yes, we like knowing our food comes from our own soil and the work of our own hands. But we live the way we do not because of some overwhelming philosophical decision, or some evangelical belief, but because it seems to make sense to us. We’re gardeners. We’re a family. We don’t like waste, and we worry about leaving a mess behind us.
What does that make us? Who knows. Who cares.
I’m not sure why you need some overwhelming belief or fear or dogma to arrange your life around.
Take the debate over oil. Do you have to believe we’ve passed peak oil production to decide to use less? Do you have to believe the end of the world is coming before you take steps to conserve resources?
There are those who will tell you that we’ll be running out of oil in a dozen years (or 50, or 75), and that you had better prepare right now for a completely self-sufficient lifestyle, where you can produce all of your own food and all of your energy needs.
Then there are others who tell you we’ll never run out of oil, and that it’s our American right to drive gas guzzlers and run the air conditioner full bore. The Ayn Rand Institute urged us all last week to just celebrate “Big Oil Day.”
There are those who say our rampant overuse of fossil fuels and the greenhouse gases they produce have already created an irreversible crisis. And those who say global warming is some sort of conspiracy theory.
There’s good science and bad science out there, and you can study it on your own, if you can wade through the politics.
Or, you don’t have to. Because even if we’re not pushing toward the end of life on Earth, you can still make an effort to protect your little portion of it.
The air doesn’t have to be unbreathable for us to make decisions that will reduce the amount of carbon we’re responsible for adding to it. The water doesn’t have to be undrinkable for us to think about how our actions affect ground water. We can choose to live thinking lives, aware of how our actions affect other beings and systems.
To me it’s not about dogma, or being some sort of Earth Mother, or peak-oiler, or gardenista. It seems like logic. Don’t leave the lights on or the water running. Think about what you’re flushing down the drain, and if it’s not something you want in your drinking water, maybe you shouldn’t have bought it in the first place.
We all need to share this Earth, so it makes sense not to use more than we need. And since we all do use more than we need, it makes sense to think about how we can use less — less water, less gasoline, less heating oil, less electricity.
We shouldn’t need a crisis to be reasonable. But we might get one if we’re not.
Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and features editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.
Have a question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.
