May 2006: Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, premieres. The world utters a collective, "Holy shit! We are so totally screwed!" Then it begins to change lightbulbs at a frantic pace.
March 2007: Right wing jackals everywhere wet themselves with glee when it's revealed that Al and Tipper Gore's mansion in Tennessee burns through gas and electricity at a rate twenty times higher than the average American house.40
June 2007: My wife and I have dinner with dear friends (I'll call them Fred and Liselle) who lean pretty far to the right on many issues, but I've known them both for thirty years (!) and love them so we put up with it, and they with us, and I don't consider either of them to be jackals. Typically, the four of us ratchet our opposing views up to a nearly unbearable level of tension and discomfort, and then one of us will say, "So, how about another drink?" Then we let all the political stuff go and play cards.
On this particular day, as soon as we're seated at the restaurant, they pounce with the Gore's-house thing. "Diminishes the messenger," I counter. "Doesn't diminish the message." My friend, "Fred," ponders this in the way that he ponders most things, which is to say, deeply and quietly.
Finally he says, "That's a good point."
December 2007: Al and Tipper Gore announce that their house has been renovated and now sports geothermal heat, solar panels and cooling, rainwater collecting systems, and a mansion's worth of new lightbulbs including LEDs, which cost a lot more than CFLs. The Green Building Council awards the home its Gold certification.41
Jackals everywhere are seen hanging their heads low and slinking back to their caves and cesspools without comment.
January 2008: My niece, 14, sends email listing a number of actions that everyone can take to help the planet. I reply by using her message as a checklist of the things we've done at our house: CFLs and LEDs, sink aerators and restricted-flow showerheads, rain barrels and soaker hoses, graywater reuse in summer, cold/cold setting on the washer, outdoor clothes line, skylights and insulated curtains and solar shades, obsessive recycling of everything, thermostat at 63 day/50 night (winter) on a high-efficiency furnace, compost collection, organic garden, "economy" car, local shopping, Energy Star compliance, "off" switches for standby electronics, double-insulated exterior walls, a foot of attic insulation.... The checklist seems more like an avalanche, but it makes my niece happy—and to be honest, even though a lot of this stuff has been a pain to implement, it makes me happy, too.
Somewhere during the fall I saw a green ad campaign about making "changes so small you won't even notice." Well, that's crap. You definitely notice that your feet and hands are cold when the house is 63 degrees. And you certainly notice when you walk into a room at night and watch the CFL bulbs warming, over the course of a full minute, from a faint glow to full brightness. You notice when the rainwater comes trickling from the garden hose with no pressure behind it. But what you notice more than any of those inconveniences is the heat bill that's $200 less than it was this time two years ago, and the electric bill shrinking from $130 to $50, and the water bill cut by a third. The avalanche of change doesn't have to be environmental philanthropy when it's really just basic financial sanity. Choose your ideology: ecologically green, or economically lean? The planet doesn't care, as long as the changes get made.
I probably won't ever get Gold certification from any Green Building Councils (I'd have to tear my mass-produced house down and start over first), but at least I can look any jackals in the eye who were about to growl, Yeah, well what are you doing? and tell 'em to do the same thing that this guy told 190 other nations to do at the 2007 Bali conference on climate change:
====SOURCES====
40 Gregg Easterbrook, "Al Gore's Outsourcing Solution." New York Times, March 9, 2007.
41 "Gore Gets Green Kudos for Home Renovation." Associated Press, Dec. 13, 2007.
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