Green Like Me

I have spent a lot of time in my adult life talking about things I hate, like coconut, other people’s kids, Eskimos, and the environment. Now I am going to write about those things. Well, I am going to write about one of those things. I am sure I don’t need to explain the rest of them. You understand.

The environment is not really that great, and I am tired of people trying to convince me that it is.

Historically, Americans have seen progress as a good thing. This is our legacy. It makes sense. For millions of years, human beings were nothing more than large, clever animals. Sure we could talk, but birds can do that. We could make and use tools, but chimps and otters do that. There was nothing particularly special about human beings until we learned to master fire, burned down a forest, and put in a Starbucks. That is when progress was born. And to this day, as intelligent and highly organized as we imagine ourselves to be, the only thing that separates man from beast is mastery of our environment. All other animals live and die at the mercy of their environment. They are powerless to do anything other than adapt to changes, or die. Not us. While the other animals get their asses kicked daily by fundamental changes to their environments, we made the whole world our bitch.

Hell. Yes.

That’s why we are cool.

But lately our culture has become bent on the notion of being “green.” We think every tiny thing we do must somehow involve saving the environment. It took a really long time for this to happen. It started with hippies. I blame the hippies. As the baby boomers began to realize exactly how massive a failure their little counter-culture experiment had become, some of them got jobs. Many of them didn’t want a real job, so they became teachers. Those teachers began spewing their hippie propaganda all over kids like me. It was us, generation x, the kids who went to school in the seventies and eighties, who got the guilt treatment about how awful we were being to the earth. The hippies told us it was true, and we believed them.

Stupid hippies.

Unfortunately, another common American trait is that few of us ever question the things we were taught as children. Now that we are the target demographic, eagerly awaiting our turn to control the world once the last of the baby boomers have driven their RVs into the sunset, generation x continues to believe, and teach our children the same hippie propaganda we learned as kids.

The problem is that it is all bullshit.

We never stopped to think about it. Conservation and environmentalism in any form seem intuitively positive to us. So we never really think a thing through. If something seems “green” we like it, no matter what.

At first I started saying I hate the environment because I thought it was a funny thing to say in the face of everyone in my generation being so concerned about whether or not there was a recycling bin next to every trash bin in the entire fucking world. There were protests about it when I was in college. I didn’t really hate the environment, I just thought the people who were so bent on saving it were stupid, and I wanted to make fun of them. That’s what I do. See at the time I noticed what I thought were some fundamental flaws in their philosophies as they related to their demands. For example, the recycling bins were made of plastic. This amused me. I thought that a desire to recycle materials was necessarily reflective of an overall desire to reduce pollution and man’s impact on the natural world. So it seemed odd to me that you would produce vehicles to aid in such efforts which are constructed from a material which is particularly good at polluting the environment, both in its production and in its existence, particularly the spectacular ability plastics have to clutter up the natural world for projected millennia. I also thought that eventually the pseudo-activists pushing for such things would realize their own contradictions, and the matter would resolve itself in coming decades when we all laughed together about how funny the nineties were with all the flannel shirts, Doc Martens, and crazy ideas like recycling.

But I was wrong. I was wrong about people realizing the inherent contradictions in recycling. I was also wrong in assuming that the desire to recycle was a manifestation of a broader concern about man’s impact on the natural world. Apparently the desire to recycle is only a desire to recycle.

It has been demonstrated over and over again, by researchers and investigative reporters, that all the recycling we do, of cans, and glass, (and now even plastics), paper, etc., all the time we spend sorting it (when it could otherwise be “business time”) and placing it in those big plastic containers in front of our houses on trash day, is in vain. We know this. I don’t even need to explain it because you can Google it quickly. It is a fact, that the energy used to process the materials collected in all of those recycling bins creates more pollution, and a greater ultimate impact on the environment than would the production of the very same new materials. Also, recycling is way more expensive, and a total pain in the ass.

But we do it anyway, even though we know it is bullshit, because our teachers told us to, and we loved those old hippies.

Strange right?

Now I really do hate the environment. But I have a healthy respect for it. I am afraid of the earth. I don’t generally spend a lot of time trying to protect things I fear. As a Darwinist, I believe that this world created us, and when it wants to, just as it has done to so many species before us, most of which we will never even know about, the earth will kick our asses. It isn’t the other way around. I don’t believe that global warming is something humans can control, and consequently, I don’t think global warming is something we can cause either. I saw Al Gore’s stupid PowerPoint presentation. But I know the difference between a correlation and a causal relationship. I also like to think I know propaganda when I see it. But what I definitely know is how little we really do know about anything, let alone our own planet and how it works and changes over time. We are not nearly as smart as we think we are. I think it is vain and short sighted for us to think that we, a bunch of clever apes who learned to burn shit down, have the ability to destroy a planet that created us, which existed long before we did, and which will exist long after we are gone. The earth could simply erase us any time, or we could erase ourselves, and in a hundred thousand years, maybe less, there would be no noticeable trace that we had ever existed.

You don’t have to believe what I write. You probably shouldn’t anyway. I am notoriously misled.

But I am not all bad. I do a number of green things myself.

I ride an electric train to work every day. Not that kind of electric train, a big one. I ride Sacramento’s municipal light rail system. Public transportation is considered very green because of its perceived efficiencies. Multiple people on a single vehicle is way more efficient than a bunch of individual cars on the road, right? Maybe. I started riding the train because I am cheap and lazy. My new job doesn’t pay for parking downtown. So riding the train is much cheaper and easier than searching for and ultimately paying for parking. It was hard for me to decide that damaging the environment had just become too expensive for me. I guess life is full of trade-offs. I like to ride outside of typical commute hours when the trains are mostly empty. A train is way bigger than any car, and sometimes I am the only person riding. That is my favorite. I like to think about how much coal is being burned at the local power plant to produce all the electricity it takes to run that train for the 25 or so miles I ride, with all the stops, and making cars wait at intersections when we cross, idling all those emissions into the air. And then it just keeps going after I get off, even if no one is on it. Riding the train is awesome.

When I am not riding a huge train alone, I drive an old truck with a lot of miles on it. Again, I do this because I am cheap and don’t want to make car payments. I plan to drive it for as long as I possibly can. I know this doesn’t seem particularly green, but consider that driving an old car is the ultimate form of recycling. I maintain that even though my truck is huge, and gets terrible gas mileage, and that I never have anything to haul around and it probably doesn’t even make sense for me to have a truck, I am creating far less an impact on the environment with my old truck than you are with your new hybrid. But I am glad you have a new car. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a new car? Those shiny new things aren’t made from recycled materials, and they are almost all plastic! I love to think about all the chemicals that go in to manufacturing new cars, with all their toxic pollution and industrial waste. I maintain that I could drive my truck around, all day, every day, for the next ten years, getting 12 or 13 miles per gallon, and I would still have less an impact on the environment than the manufacture and sale of a single “fuel-efficient” new car, even a hybrid. I loved that last year everyone thought it was so good for the environment to turn in cars that already exist, to purchase new cars that had to be manufactured. Awesome. That was plastic recycling bins all over again. And then we just dumped all those old cars in a landfill or something. Sweet. That was good for the environment. And what happens when the hybrids wear out? What are we gonna do with all those giant batteries with all their toxic chemicals? Those will be good for the environment also when we dump them in a landfill. Because by then we will all want electric cars, to be as green as possible. I am sure no one will conveniently forget, as mentioned above, that the vast majority of electricity in this country, which we will use to charge all those even bigger batteries in our electric cars, is produced by oil and coal-burning power plants. When mine stops working I will probably just buy another old truck and drive it as long as I can, because I am an environmentalist.

I carry and use a re-useable aluminum water bottle. I do this mostly because I ride the train at odd hours, and I figure I can bash a crack head in the face with it if one gives me any trouble. Aluminum water bottles hurt more than plastic ones. Any impact this may have on the environment is purely coincidental, but still worth mentioning.

I shop at Costco where there are no plastic grocery bags. That’s right bitches. I go to the biggest store I can find with no windows to buy a lot of shit I don’t need and will ultimately throw away anyway. There are so many lights on in Costco that even on the brightest sunny day my eyes never need to make that awkward adjustment – you know the one I mean. Plus I never have to wonder what the TVs might look like in my house, running the risk of wasting fuel to return one because the picture wasn’t huge enough. Costco conveniently keeps all of the televisions turned on inside the store all the time. Now that’s thinking green.

And lastly, I urinate outside any chance I get, particularly if I have been drinking. This saves a lot of water, not to mention chemicals that are used to treat waste water, and it helps feed plants and grasses to produce more oxygen. I think this is a guy thing. It feels good to take a leak outdoors. It is almost primal. Maybe it is our way of marking our territory. A lot of us do it all the time and the people around us have no idea, particularly women, because it is more fun to keep it a secret from them. Also, it is super convenient, and a simple little reminder about how awesome it is to be a guy, which is a human being, who cares about the environment.