One Thanksgiving at my mom’s, when Trevor was three, he came into the kitchen while I was stuffing the turkey. He walked up to the counter, where the giant (to him) carcass lay sprawled just above his eye level. I paused as he examined the pallid, bulbous object and the zootomical structures visible through the gaping hole, and watched him try to process what he was seeing. He was clearly fascinated and puzzled. When I explained what I was doing, his only comment was, “That was a nice turkey. It had a face.”
I could relate. After all, I had stopped eating red meat a few years before he was born (it’s now been 25 years), and the nice-cow-with-a-face factor played no small part in my decision.
Where am I going with this? I saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary on global warming the other day. It brought all the little pieces together in a very scary big picture and made me want to take stock of my greenness.
It’s pretty green to not eat red meat. I’ve known this since I read “Diet for a Small Planet” when I was 21. (It takes more than eight times the fossil-fuel energy to produce animal protein than it does to produce plant protein.) I’ve always been fairly green, but I can’t take credit for all of it. For most of my adult life, I didn’t have the money for the big car, sub-zero fridge, irrigated and artfully lit landscaping, or any of the bourgeois trimmings the middle and upper classes believe are their due. I did live like that for almost three years not long ago, and only felt a little guilty about it at the time. But due to certain events in my life, I shuffled off the material burdens of my class and started traveling light again. I’m more at home in a thrift store than at Nordstrom, never owned a new car, I’ve recycled compulsively for almost 15 years… And now I’m greener than ever, again due to circumstance rather than conscious choice. I don’t even have a car here in Paris and my fridge… Let’s just say every time I open it I expect to see tiny bottles of Jack in the door… But it probably uses a fifth of the electricity my last fridge used. Then again, there were the three and a half round-trip flights from California to Paris this year. I’m gonna have to turn out a lot of lights to make up for those. I generally don’t feel too bad about my track record, but there’s room for improvement.
In the movie, Al Gore said people have a tendency to go from denial straight to despair without stopping in between to try to fix the problem. You have to understand that this is just not an option. Americans produce 30% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (and we make up five percent of the world’s population). It’s shameful. Right now, you need to take a good look at your own environmental footprint and start changing the way you live or your grandchildren, maybe even your children will not have a planet. This is not a drill.
This chart shows that Americans dump 5 and a half tons of carbon into the air every year per capita. Twice as much as Japan, Russia, or the European Union. More than five times the world average.
There are things we can do that will have a measurable impact in just a few years if enough of us do them. Start by watching the movie with your kids. Do the little things and think about trying some big things. Demand that your government face the facts and act. Educate and pressure those around you. Don’t tell yourself it’s not your business and don’t be nice. You (as a society) have no problem expressing your disdain for anyone who dares light a cigarette in your presence. Dish some of that out to people with (other) environmentally destructive habits. When someone lights up, you get angry and aggressive because your kid is breathing the secondhand smoke. It’s time for you to get pissed off when people show up at soccer practice in their Suburbans and Escalades.
It’s been 18 years since Trevor lost that little bit of innocence. It’s almost Thanksgiving again, and I told my French kids I’d make them a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. So I asked the lovely chicken lady at the marché if I could order a turkey in advance. She asked, with a big smile, if it was for “Sonksgeeveeng” and told me she had lots of American clients who ordered turkeys at this time of year. I’m going to have to get a turkey not much bigger than a biggish chicken if I want it to actually fit in what Vincent calls my Barbie-sized oven. He teases me about the hugeness of things American, and rightly so. Size does matter; big is bad.
I’m determined to do what I can to make sure Trevor and his kids have something to geeve sonks for. I hope you do the same.