Ranting Details: Guest Post: Green Identity Crisis

JUST WANT TO SHARE THIS FANTASTIC PIECE MY ROOMMATE NICK MCCARVEL WROTE RECENTLY FOR GREEN FOR GOOD! ENJOY!!!

Lately, I’ve been having an identity crisis. It’s a crisis that I could see coming for a while now, but I’m still unsure of how to respond to it; there seems to be no clear answer. Everything just looks, well, green.

There are two things that I think of constantly each day: money (green) and the environment (also green). I wake up in the morning and think about the money that will come into or leave my pocket and how my actions will impact Mother Earth. The two thoughts swirl in my head like a green smoothie, but it becomes too thick to pour out of the blender: a Green Identity Crisis stuck in my head.

I say “Green Identity Crisis” because of this: our economy is in a violent downward spiral, joining our environment. But while the economists and talking heads tell us to spend, spend, spend in order to encourage the reboot of the economy, I can’t help but think of my mantra: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”

It’s green versus Green, and I’m not sure who’s winning.

My generation – characterized as The Complacent Generation or Generation Facebook – is left to wonder: what do we prioritize? How do we become Generation Green? Do we prioritize the business page, telling us to keep up our consumer spending? Or do we prioritize the Sunday section on Green Living, telling us to rummage through second-hand stores and trash bins to find furniture for our new apartments.

Because that’s what this crisis is all about, in a way: consuming. Sure, there’s all that credit crap and the housing conundrum and stocks and bonds and Wall Street and Main Street. But for the babies of the ‘80s and ‘90s, it all comes down to Green Street: how will we paint the walls of our future? Dollar Bill Green or Rain Forest Green? It seems easier to stick with beige, but then we ask: do we use a fresh-coat of Wal-Mart-cheap paint, or just let the paint job our parents did in the ‘70s live on for a few more decades?

I for one could never stop consuming completely. I need my groceries; I need my occasional meal out and I need clothes on my back and materials to fill my too-small apartment. But there’s a fundamental difference between the kind of consuming I like to do (think “second-hand” or “organic” or “rummaging”) compared to the kind of consuming that most are akin to (think “K Mart” or “Pottery Barn” or “Radio Shack”).

The fundamental difference is rooted here: my kind of consuming doesn’t encourage new production for new products. It encourages a recycling society, a society that shares, and a society that gets high off the phrase, “One man’s trash is another man's treasure.”

This kind of consuming isn’t what the business page wants us to do. I feel as though I need to walk the Yellow Brick Road and face the great Green Oz himself and ask: “Can you solve my Green Identity Crisis, Your Ozness?”

There has to be a fundamental (read “life-altering”) change in the way we live. If there is not, the very planet we live on will cease to – dare I say it? – live. It will die a slow, Green death of paper-dollar cuts, bleeding glowing Green goo off the bottom of the South Pole. There won’t be any green plants to decorate the funeral hall. No water to drink at the reception. Not even Oz can solve that.

My identity crisis often makes me feel like a monster when I look in the mirror. I look a shade of green for some reason, with a lush forest for hair and dollar bills for ears. But which to keep: The hair that keeps my head warm? Or the ears that help me hear?

I’d like to keep both, thank you very much – I’m just not sure how. Nor is Washington, DC, or the rest of the world for that matter. Weeks ago our government shook its head “no” at the automakers, calling their plea for a bailout ridiculous. Now they’re handing over the cash likes it is grass they’ve absent-mindedly torn from the front lawn with sticky, little-kid fingers.

But, as mom and dad always say, if you tear out enough green grass, the lawn will eventually become brown, empty and barren. It seems that is exactly the way both our economy and our environment are headed. It’s just that I don’t want to solve my Green Identity Crisis by covering it in brown – but what else can I do? How else can we live?

-Nick McCarvel