Citizen Green

I stumbled on this signpost in the carpark of a local supermarket and was utterly taken aback. I admit I was also highly irritated, which is why I took the photo: I wanted to figure out why I was so annoyed. 

On the spectrum of support for the environment and green economy, I confess to being a quiet and sometimes unsmiling participant. This is not because I don't care. I have lived in tropical climates where it's impossible not to be filled with awe at the scale and intensity of weather phenomena. In particular I remember a cyclone that hit Bombay when I was eight. It brought winds that toppled gigantic palms flat on the ground, and wrought such an furor in the ocean (across from which we lived) that waves surged over the cliffs and onto the streets, casting a spray of water that rattled like gunfire on our windows. I've also been lucky enough to live in calmer green surroundings--homes bordered by thickset pines and woods, gardens that housed anything from jasmine and wild orchids to blue plum and pear trees. 

I even had early stirrings of activism. At 10, I wrote a blistering letter (one thesaurus word after another) to the local supermarket, admonishing them for the mass production of plastic bags--all this because I learned that when cast into the ocean, plastic bags confused and occasionally choked sea turtles to death! As an adolescent I came to worship Wordsworth, and wrote a series of appalling poems about dryads and wanderers in the forest. I pressed and classified flowers, and even thumbed through a tantalizing book called "The Amateur Naturalist."

So why now am I not a green citizen?

Because of what the parking sign represents: that it's not enough to just be eco-friendly. Now there's a hierarchy of consciousness and a meritocracy based on eco-performance. I can't park my hand-me-down SUV near the entrance to the market not because it's reserved for the disabled, but because someone arbitrarily decided that the fact that I can't afford a hybrid is worth being penalized. Things like this make you feel permanently, exhaustingly negligent--it's not enough to get your groceries in a cloth bag, print double-sided, buy halogen bulbs; you have to have a Prius too! When did the process of encouraging civic duty mutate into a caste system that excludes and shames the majority?

The problem with being green is that it seems you can't just be; it has to shoot out of your pores. Every environmental "activist" who turns me off is of the proselytizing variety. It's not even as though they're full of self-congratulation; in fact, they're depressingly intent on fetishizing their tiniest consumption. If this bleak approach were the means to inspiring people, we'd have seen the results by now. I don't see people across the nation lining up for compost heaps and 60-second showers just because someone tells them that's the right way to live. 

From a marketing angle, this - here I return to the parking sign - can only work for a fixed population. What happens is that people who already belong to a subsect of the populous - mostly financially solvent folk who can afford to eat and live organic - are reaffirmed in their decision-making, value systems and mode of expenditure. The supermarket targets a specific customer and pats them on the back. It's a tactic to keep your consumer base loyal and to make them feel valued. On that level it works, though I wonder if someone who's chosen the organic route needs increased incentive?

On another level, where I blunder in, this is not a way to motivate people outside the core audience. It can only incentivize being what you already are: the owner of a hybrid. Else you're suddenly a second-class citizen. And in this particular economic moment, any eco-friendly person like myself is also a cost-conscious person--and therefore worried about how to get by without a salary bump, how to eat healthy and save money, how to manage insurance bills. I'm not in a place to create the kind of lifestyle change that involves $7 organic raspberries, let alone the price of a 'preferred parking' spot. 

I suppose it's interesting that in the face of what I call flag-waving 'green' rhetoric, my defense is equally high-flown. I am not perfect and although I do more in the way of integrating energy-saving solutions and care for the environment into my life than ever before, I could always go one step further. But my point is simply that people are awake to the world around them. They see the damage they've wrought and inherited, and make gradual, calibrated decisions to alter their lifestyles and to practice new consciousness. The green revolution is alive and important; I just wish we could live it without needing to see who's shouting the loudest from the rooftops.