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February 2008
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Green with worry
In a blink, Bay Area residents have gone from being the most eco-conscious in the nation to the most eco-neurotic. We fight with our spouses over plastic bottles, head to our therapists in tears over rising oceans, and swing uncomfortably between guilt and denial every time we pull out a credit card or jump in the car. So how do we save the world without driving ourselves (and everyone else) crazy?
Leslie Crawford
WEB EXTRA: Watch Leslie Crawford on The View from the Bay!
Chapter 1:
The case of the drowning woman
It’s one of those chilly, fogged-in afternoons that make San Franciscans wish they lived somewhere like Sacramento. But the weather—rather, this weather—isn’t what’s making Michelle Bodwell* cry. As she settles on her therapist’s couch, days of pent-up grief pour out. It’s all she can do to go through the motions of her life—her grad school classes, her part-time nanny job—and the worst part is that she feels so alone. You’d think her friends, who are smart, liberal, open-minded people in their 30s, like she is, would be supportive. If the subject were bad boyfriends or problems with her parents, they would let her rant for hours. But this…oh, geez, that look they give her when they sense she’s on the edge: disdain mixed with embarrassment and the frozen plea, “Please don’t go there.” So she saves her tears for Tuesdays at 3, when her therapist is happy to let her talk or weep about whatever she feels like.
* Some names have been changed.
It’s the polar bears. They’re drowning. “Polar bears aren’t supposed to drown,” Bodwell tells her therapist, a graceful woman in her 40s who has been practicing psychology for 15 years. Ever since she heard a BBC report a few days earlier, Bodwell hasn’t been able to erase the image from her mind: dozens of bears floating in the Arctic waters, dead from exhaustion after trying to swim to solid ground that’s disappearing like ice cubes in a cup of warm tea. “I feel so overwhelmed by what these poor animals are going through because of our incredible stupidity,” she says. “Saving polar bears from drowning is not a priority, but driving our SUVs is.”
Now, imagine for a moment that Bodwell is sitting beside a box of tissues in an office on, say, Manhattan’s Upper West Side. At this point, her sympathetic therapist might gently lead the discussion away from the Arctic and toward the patient’s inner landscape: What does she think the polar bears mean? Are they a metaphor, perhaps, for her aging father? A symbol of some long-repressed childhood loss? But given that Bodwell is in San Francisco’s Marina district, it’s as plain as the
crystalline blue sky starting to peek out from the fog, unveiling another global-warming-beautiful day—this is about the bears.
Well, the bears and much more. In Bodwell’s case, polar bears represent the tip of the iceberg, as it were, and their demise makes her feel as if she’s living in a world teetering on oblivion. She frets over the mass extermination of the gorillas. The mysterious disappearance of the honeybees. The daily insults: friends who use too many plastic bags and buy overpackaged goods, crowds at a “green” festival who leave trash all over Golden Gate Park, and just about everybody else who consumes and drives and wastes too much. Even a weekend visit to her parents’ house in Redding is a tainted joy. Her whole life, Bodwell has found her greatest pleasure in wilderness and wildlife. But now, the woods and meadows she played in as a child are being replaced by roads, tract homes, and Best Buys. As the planet seems to wither and burn and melt, Bodwell feels as if there are fewer and fewer places to find refuge or solid footing.
As for the story’s metaphoric significance, isn’t it obvious? Bodwell is the bear, deluged in this newly unfolding era of the Great Thaw. And like a lot of other perfectly normal people around the Bay Area, knowing what’s happening to the world around her—and that there’s probably not much she can do about it—is making her sad, anxious, depressed, and even, it must be said, a little nuts. “Sometimes I feel such despair,” Bodwell confesses, “I can’t pull myself together. It’s hard to deal with these feelings of grief, because most people are shoving them under the rug and, in the meantime, calling me irrational.”
Well, the bears and much more. In Bodwell’s case, polar bears represent the tip of the iceberg, as it were, and their demise makes her feel as if she’s living in a world teetering on oblivion. She frets over the mass extermination of the gorillas. The mysterious disappearance of the honeybees. The daily insults: friends who use too many plastic bags and buy overpackaged goods, crowds at a “green” festival who leave trash all over Golden Gate Park, and just about everybody else who consumes and drives and wastes too much. Even a weekend visit to her parents’ house in Redding is a tainted joy. Her whole life, Bodwell has found her greatest pleasure in wilderness and wildlife. But now, the woods and meadows she played in as a child are being replaced by roads, tract homes, and Best Buys. As the planet seems to wither and burn and melt, Bodwell feels as if there are fewer and fewer places to find refuge or solid footing.
As for the story’s metaphoric significance, isn’t it obvious? Bodwell is the bear, deluged in this newly unfolding era of the Great Thaw. And like a lot of other perfectly normal people around the Bay Area, knowing what’s happening to the world around her—and that there’s probably not much she can do about it—is making her sad, anxious, depressed, and even, it must be said, a little nuts. “Sometimes I feel such despair,” Bodwell confesses, “I can’t pull myself together. It’s hard to deal with these feelings of grief, because most people are shoving them under the rug and, in the meantime, calling me irrational.”
Chapter 2:
An inconvenient movie
Not so long ago, someone like Bodwell might have spent her 50 precious minutes in therapy agonizing over the ridiculous price of real estate, her questionable career choices, her fear of never meeting The One. Green used to be the color of envy, not panic. Sure, a few know-it-alls, dressed head to toe in killjoy hemp, may have assailed their therapists with doom-and-gloom scenarios about decimated rainforests and holes in the ozone, but they were on the lunatic fringe. The rest of us were feeling pretty smug about those tax-deductible checks we sent to the Sierra Club every year. We shopped at Whole Foods and reused the plastic deli containers until they sprung leaks. We ripped the labels off our old magazines and left them at the gym for some other New Yorker–loving stationary-bike
rider to enjoy. And look what we had to show for our good works: a bay clean enough to dip our toes into, wide-open spaces to hike in, spectacular views marred only occasionally by smog, free parking for Zipcars.
That was before Al Gore went and burst our bubble. “Everything changed for me when my husband and I saw An Inconvenient Truth,” says San Franciscan Debora Tingley, a scientist and mother of three. “The moment we stepped out of the movie, I told my husband we were replacing our 10-mile-per-gallon Ford SUV with a Prius.” Besides the SUV, she also did away with her family’s incandescent lights, bottled water, and new furniture purchases (everything gets snapped up on Craigslist now). Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary had a similar effect on a lot of us. It made us change our behavior in big and little ways. It made us think—and think and think and think. Which is a good thing, right? Except when it’s not.
These days, just as people in other parts of the country are starting to consider changing a lightbulb or two, many of us here in the Bay Area are in a whole different place. Take, for instance, self-described “recycling-obsessed” Heidi Kotansky, an editor at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit resource for parents. Nothing about the way she looks or talks says “intolerant, crunchy-granola type.” Yet, Kotansky admits, “I go into friends’ trash and dig out stuff, and carry around scraps of paper or empty bottles for an entire day until I can recycle them.”
San Francisco literary agent Danielle Suetcov, who has turned down great job opportunities because they would mean driving to work, has become compulsive about clustering errands. “I get a lump in my throat whenever I get in the car. I feel like I’m taking a spray can to the environment.” Lisa Behrens, a Berkeley mother, feels so torn about the extravagance of the nightly baths she needs to help her get to sleep that she’s started reusing her daughter’s bathwater. “It sounds gross, but she’s pretty clean,” Beh- rens says. Then, when Behrens is done, sometimes she fills up plastic milk containers with the dirty water and dumps it in the garden. Her husband has no idea about any of this. “When I ask him not to
That was before Al Gore went and burst our bubble. “Everything changed for me when my husband and I saw An Inconvenient Truth,” says San Franciscan Debora Tingley, a scientist and mother of three. “The moment we stepped out of the movie, I told my husband we were replacing our 10-mile-per-gallon Ford SUV with a Prius.” Besides the SUV, she also did away with her family’s incandescent lights, bottled water, and new furniture purchases (everything gets snapped up on Craigslist now). Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary had a similar effect on a lot of us. It made us change our behavior in big and little ways. It made us think—and think and think and think. Which is a good thing, right? Except when it’s not.
These days, just as people in other parts of the country are starting to consider changing a lightbulb or two, many of us here in the Bay Area are in a whole different place. Take, for instance, self-described “recycling-obsessed” Heidi Kotansky, an editor at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit resource for parents. Nothing about the way she looks or talks says “intolerant, crunchy-granola type.” Yet, Kotansky admits, “I go into friends’ trash and dig out stuff, and carry around scraps of paper or empty bottles for an entire day until I can recycle them.”
San Francisco literary agent Danielle Suetcov, who has turned down great job opportunities because they would mean driving to work, has become compulsive about clustering errands. “I get a lump in my throat whenever I get in the car. I feel like I’m taking a spray can to the environment.” Lisa Behrens, a Berkeley mother, feels so torn about the extravagance of the nightly baths she needs to help her get to sleep that she’s started reusing her daughter’s bathwater. “It sounds gross, but she’s pretty clean,” Beh- rens says. Then, when Behrens is done, sometimes she fills up plastic milk containers with the dirty water and dumps it in the garden. Her husband has no idea about any of this. “When I ask him not to
drain her tub, he doesn’t ask why.”
The truth is, on the spectrum of eco-worry, most of us are probably closer to Behrens’ mate—not blissfully oblivious, exactly, and not in total denial, but not consumed with guilt or fear, either. (Indeed, a recent study found that Californians are far more likely than the rest of the nation to see global warming as a serious threat, but are also more hopeful that greenhouse gases can be cut.) Ironically, Behrens’ husband is a longtime environmental professional. “I think he knows one plastic soda bottle isn’t going to change the world,” she says.
But more and more of us are becoming like Behrens and Bodwell, high-strung eco-worriers for whom a new study in the New York Times or a Yahoo! headline are triggers that can easily cascade into a swirling mass of anxiety about, well, almost everything: Bisphenol-A in water coolers, Diet Coke cans sent to the landfill (not to mention the scary chemicals in those artificial sweeteners), lead in designer lipstick. For an extreme eco-worrier pondering how the world’s fragile ecosystems are intertwined, all the toxic dots can seem connected. A drive-through Happy Meal becomes Antarctica’s burden to bear—even tofu, the Gandhi of food, becomes a culprit for its role in the destruction of the rainforest. “It might start with an awareness of what’s going into your baby’s mouth, or the cost of gas, or that your husband is taking half-hour showers,” says Santa Barbara–based therapist Linda Buzzell. Some individuals and couples don’t even understand the true source of their edginess and conflict. “They might come in complaining about their sex lives,” says Point Reyes therapist Lesley Osman, only to discover that the underlying problem is “basic differences in how they approach this stuff.”
One sure sign of how overwhelming “this stuff” has become for some of us: A new breed of mental-health professionals—“eco-therapists,” as Buzzell and Osman identify themselves—has popped up on the Left Coast. You might expect them to be weirdos, preying on the equally wacko and forlorn—Aura Cleansers 2.0. But most are standard-grade therapists who’ve found a specialty that makes perfect sense in today’s world. “The bad feelings are reflective of the society we’re living in,” Osman says. “The depression, anxiety, panic, and feelings of hopelessness are symptoms of a world out of control. After all, what we’re facing is a fear of extinction. The people
The truth is, on the spectrum of eco-worry, most of us are probably closer to Behrens’ mate—not blissfully oblivious, exactly, and not in total denial, but not consumed with guilt or fear, either. (Indeed, a recent study found that Californians are far more likely than the rest of the nation to see global warming as a serious threat, but are also more hopeful that greenhouse gases can be cut.) Ironically, Behrens’ husband is a longtime environmental professional. “I think he knows one plastic soda bottle isn’t going to change the world,” she says.
But more and more of us are becoming like Behrens and Bodwell, high-strung eco-worriers for whom a new study in the New York Times or a Yahoo! headline are triggers that can easily cascade into a swirling mass of anxiety about, well, almost everything: Bisphenol-A in water coolers, Diet Coke cans sent to the landfill (not to mention the scary chemicals in those artificial sweeteners), lead in designer lipstick. For an extreme eco-worrier pondering how the world’s fragile ecosystems are intertwined, all the toxic dots can seem connected. A drive-through Happy Meal becomes Antarctica’s burden to bear—even tofu, the Gandhi of food, becomes a culprit for its role in the destruction of the rainforest. “It might start with an awareness of what’s going into your baby’s mouth, or the cost of gas, or that your husband is taking half-hour showers,” says Santa Barbara–based therapist Linda Buzzell. Some individuals and couples don’t even understand the true source of their edginess and conflict. “They might come in complaining about their sex lives,” says Point Reyes therapist Lesley Osman, only to discover that the underlying problem is “basic differences in how they approach this stuff.”
One sure sign of how overwhelming “this stuff” has become for some of us: A new breed of mental-health professionals—“eco-therapists,” as Buzzell and Osman identify themselves—has popped up on the Left Coast. You might expect them to be weirdos, preying on the equally wacko and forlorn—Aura Cleansers 2.0. But most are standard-grade therapists who’ve found a specialty that makes perfect sense in today’s world. “The bad feelings are reflective of the society we’re living in,” Osman says. “The depression, anxiety, panic, and feelings of hopelessness are symptoms of a world out of control. After all, what we’re facing is a fear of extinction. The people
who are not anxious—those are the ones I’m really scared for.”
Hmm. It would be easy to dismiss global warming as the guilt provoker du jour in a place filled with overprivileged people who overthink everything. If Gore hadn’t given them a new phobia to fixate on, wouldn’t the eco-anxious be stressing out about something else—terrorism, earthquakes, Harvard’s acceptance rate? But another view is to take the trend seriously, to acknowledge that the entire construct of Bay Area life has changed—slowly at first, now at frightening speeds. Suddenly, all bets are off, and no one with a brain is still stuck in 2003, when recycling a stack of newspapers was going to save the planet. If you accept this view, none of us are dealing so well with the new stakes, the sense that every move a thinking person makes, every moment of the day, constitutes a vote for survival or annihilation. When every watt of energy you consume, every item you buy and cup of water you boil for tea, can cause a pang of guilt—or rage—it’s hard to imagine who among us can claim to have found the comfortable middle path, that ease of purpose that fits the times and comes naturally, like throwing on a stylish down vest and a matching pair of light hikers and heading out for a walk. Earth in the balance? First we have to put our mood in the balance, and few of us find that easy.
If this is the new reality, then maybe it’s the new eco-worriers, so easy to make fun of, who are actually farther down the path. Maybe they are the canaries in the coal-fired power plant who are bravely confronting their fears and (helped by their therapists, of course) moving toward the same irony-filled, intelligent sense of hope expressed in the subtitle to Dr. Strangelove: how to learn to stop worrying and love global warming. Michael Lerner, president of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, is no Peter Sellers. He does think eco-worriers are the ones to
Hmm. It would be easy to dismiss global warming as the guilt provoker du jour in a place filled with overprivileged people who overthink everything. If Gore hadn’t given them a new phobia to fixate on, wouldn’t the eco-anxious be stressing out about something else—terrorism, earthquakes, Harvard’s acceptance rate? But another view is to take the trend seriously, to acknowledge that the entire construct of Bay Area life has changed—slowly at first, now at frightening speeds. Suddenly, all bets are off, and no one with a brain is still stuck in 2003, when recycling a stack of newspapers was going to save the planet. If you accept this view, none of us are dealing so well with the new stakes, the sense that every move a thinking person makes, every moment of the day, constitutes a vote for survival or annihilation. When every watt of energy you consume, every item you buy and cup of water you boil for tea, can cause a pang of guilt—or rage—it’s hard to imagine who among us can claim to have found the comfortable middle path, that ease of purpose that fits the times and comes naturally, like throwing on a stylish down vest and a matching pair of light hikers and heading out for a walk. Earth in the balance? First we have to put our mood in the balance, and few of us find that easy.
If this is the new reality, then maybe it’s the new eco-worriers, so easy to make fun of, who are actually farther down the path. Maybe they are the canaries in the coal-fired power plant who are bravely confronting their fears and (helped by their therapists, of course) moving toward the same irony-filled, intelligent sense of hope expressed in the subtitle to Dr. Strangelove: how to learn to stop worrying and love global warming. Michael Lerner, president of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, is no Peter Sellers. He does think eco-worriers are the ones to
watch, though. “I don’t for a minute fault people beset by these anxieties,” Lerner says. “Anxiety represents the beginning of wisdom, recognition of how terrible the prospect for the future of life on earth is. It is a terrible prospect. But in the midst of this tragedy is a tremendous opportunity to recast completely how we as a species live on the earth. We really have the potential to do that.”
Yes, I’m neurotic, but hear me roar!
Chapter 3:
Want not, fret a lot
If we have a problem, Houston, it’s a problem Houston hasn’t even begun to grapple with. Unlike in most of Texas, people in Califonia actually read Jonathan Schell. The Bay Area hills are filled with progressives and can-do types so far ahead of the green curve that Al Gore is joining a venture capital firm here and making the region his second home. When the 2007 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize says, “Unless we act with great urgency, the entire polar ice cap could be gone in 23 years,” we believe him. We are all the man and woman who knew too much.
Let’s admit it: There’s a Bay Area personality type—perfectionistic, hardworking, inclined toward extremes, self-righteous about many things—for whom environmental worry is the ideal platform on which to pontificate. Highly educated, often especially so about science and the environment, we are media-addicted information consumers with so much access to technology that it becomes ever easier to feed our obsessions. Just as the organic-food movement was launched by a privileged few, there’s luxury in fretting over each and every green worry.
Ironically, those of us who are so very open to change, and who have the financial, and intellectual resources to fix the mess we’ve helped create, also have the capacity to make ourselves—and everyone around us—miserable.
If you can afford a hybrid or expensive organic bedding but don’t buy them, does that make you a bad person? If you build solar panels but your well-to-do neighbor doesn’t, is she going to hell? A senior environmental specialist for San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, Shawn Rosenmoss is also one of the founders of the Compact, a group of environmentally concerned San Franciscans who attracted international attention when they pledged to stop buying anything but necessities for a year. In
Yes, I’m neurotic, but hear me roar!
Chapter 3:
Want not, fret a lot
If we have a problem, Houston, it’s a problem Houston hasn’t even begun to grapple with. Unlike in most of Texas, people in Califonia actually read Jonathan Schell. The Bay Area hills are filled with progressives and can-do types so far ahead of the green curve that Al Gore is joining a venture capital firm here and making the region his second home. When the 2007 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize says, “Unless we act with great urgency, the entire polar ice cap could be gone in 23 years,” we believe him. We are all the man and woman who knew too much.
Let’s admit it: There’s a Bay Area personality type—perfectionistic, hardworking, inclined toward extremes, self-righteous about many things—for whom environmental worry is the ideal platform on which to pontificate. Highly educated, often especially so about science and the environment, we are media-addicted information consumers with so much access to technology that it becomes ever easier to feed our obsessions. Just as the organic-food movement was launched by a privileged few, there’s luxury in fretting over each and every green worry.
Ironically, those of us who are so very open to change, and who have the financial, and intellectual resources to fix the mess we’ve helped create, also have the capacity to make ourselves—and everyone around us—miserable.
If you can afford a hybrid or expensive organic bedding but don’t buy them, does that make you a bad person? If you build solar panels but your well-to-do neighbor doesn’t, is she going to hell? A senior environmental specialist for San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, Shawn Rosenmoss is also one of the founders of the Compact, a group of environmentally concerned San Franciscans who attracted international attention when they pledged to stop buying anything but necessities for a year. In
her efforts to “reduce her impact on the planet,” Rosenmoss almost always buys locally and organically, and she walks or takes public transportation whenever possible. But even with that greener-than-thou profile, she still gets plenty of ribbing when someone learns that she eats meat (once a month) or drives a car (a Toyota that gets 37 miles per gallon). “People get really pissed off and tell me I’m not going far enough. I want to say, ‘What do you mean, far enough? Do you want me to kill myself so I don’t produce any greenhouse gas, except for the methane I produce when I decompose?’”
Perhaps the deepest reason for our distress is that we don’t just love Mother Nature—we worship her. In places like the Bible Belt, where the End of Days is not necessarily viewed as a bad thing, some might see the coming apocalypse—if they even believe it’s coming—as God’s will, and they take comfort in that. To them, our existential panic about snowless winters and 120-degree summers must seem almost meaningless. Yet in the Bay Area, where environmentalism is practically its own religion, global warming isn’t just killing the world, it’s also killing the thing we look to for inspiration and solace—in effect, our God. What are we supposed to do with that? What is the outlet for all our fury and sadness and fear?
Chapter 4:
Dem green angry exhausted blues
In the case of Berkeley graphic artist Erik Schmitt, the outlet was leaflets. When Bush launched his “oil war,” Schmitt was so upset that he began spending his lunch hours sticking fliers—with “Gas Hog!” written in big, bold letters at the top—under the windshield wipers of SUVs. Not surprisingly, all he accomplished was making other people mad, too. “One woman yelled at me, saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re leaving this on the cars of people in a BART station.’”
But instead of railing at the world, typical eco-worriers turn the blame inward—at our loved ones and ourselves. Take me, for example. At home, I refuse to buy chocolate candy, since traditional cocoa bean farming is environmentally destructive. “You’ve taken the joy out of Almond Joy,” my husband, Steve, mopes. He and my 10-year-old son, Sam, have also been complaining that their shirts, which I’ve begun air-drying, are scratchy. “This may be good for the environment,” says Steve—who, for some reason, isn’t constantly in a blind panic that the world is ending—“but I feel like you’re making us wear hairshirts.”
“Hmph,” I think. “That’s the least they can do for the planet.”
Considering that Steve is a Diet Coke–drinking, “que sera, sera” sort of guy, he takes it pretty well. He hardly grumbled when I replaced our plastic containers with glass, or when my efforts to save energy by
Perhaps the deepest reason for our distress is that we don’t just love Mother Nature—we worship her. In places like the Bible Belt, where the End of Days is not necessarily viewed as a bad thing, some might see the coming apocalypse—if they even believe it’s coming—as God’s will, and they take comfort in that. To them, our existential panic about snowless winters and 120-degree summers must seem almost meaningless. Yet in the Bay Area, where environmentalism is practically its own religion, global warming isn’t just killing the world, it’s also killing the thing we look to for inspiration and solace—in effect, our God. What are we supposed to do with that? What is the outlet for all our fury and sadness and fear?
Chapter 4:
Dem green angry exhausted blues
In the case of Berkeley graphic artist Erik Schmitt, the outlet was leaflets. When Bush launched his “oil war,” Schmitt was so upset that he began spending his lunch hours sticking fliers—with “Gas Hog!” written in big, bold letters at the top—under the windshield wipers of SUVs. Not surprisingly, all he accomplished was making other people mad, too. “One woman yelled at me, saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re leaving this on the cars of people in a BART station.’”
But instead of railing at the world, typical eco-worriers turn the blame inward—at our loved ones and ourselves. Take me, for example. At home, I refuse to buy chocolate candy, since traditional cocoa bean farming is environmentally destructive. “You’ve taken the joy out of Almond Joy,” my husband, Steve, mopes. He and my 10-year-old son, Sam, have also been complaining that their shirts, which I’ve begun air-drying, are scratchy. “This may be good for the environment,” says Steve—who, for some reason, isn’t constantly in a blind panic that the world is ending—“but I feel like you’re making us wear hairshirts.”
“Hmph,” I think. “That’s the least they can do for the planet.”
Considering that Steve is a Diet Coke–drinking, “que sera, sera” sort of guy, he takes it pretty well. He hardly grumbled when I replaced our plastic containers with glass, or when my efforts to save energy by
turning off major appliances at night meant our TiVo didn’t record a month’s worth of shows. The couch has been more of a strain on our relationship, but I’m sure we’ll get through it. There’s a hole in our family room where a sofa used to be. Every time Sam, who has asthma, sat on it, he began to cough and wheeze. I Googled toxic and couch and found out more than even I wanted to: about the foam made from carcinogenic petrochemicals; the glues, paints, and Scotchgard with ingredients that also cause cancer; and neuro- and endocrine disruptors, whatever those are. After a few months of living with Sam’s reactions and my growing dismay, I called the store downtown, which took the couch back. We have no place to sit and watch television, but maybe that’s better. We won’t be using all that carbon with our terrible big-screen TV.
Anecdotally, it’s striking how many eco-worriers—at least the ones willing to talk about it—are women. Mental-health experts might point out that women tend toward much higher levels of anxiety and depression than men do. Maybe. But what’s inarguable is that we do more household shopping, pack more lunches, and make more rainforest dioramas for third-grade science classes. We are the moms, and worrying is part of our job description. “We have an attachment to the future through our children,” says psychologist Dr. Miriam Greenspan, author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair. “We want to believe they will be healthy, and that their children will be healthy and have a future. The loss of faith in this gives us the sense that our future is threatened, and so we’re grieving.”
For Kimberly Danek Pinkson, founder of the San Anselmo–based EcoMom Alliance, triggers for obsessiveness can range from bottled water to Hollywood’s take on the apocalypse. “I get images of The Terminator, where everyone has to wear gas masks and the sky is dark gray.” (In those movies, of course, the hero is a mom, and her sidekick is the future governor of California—an eco-worrier’s fantasy come true.) Pinkson adds, “I think of my son, Corbin, not being able to go to Hawaii and Yosemite, places I have a strong connection to—they’ll be underwater or just not accessible. Those are the scripts that I have to turn off.”
And there’s the script we all dread: What
Anecdotally, it’s striking how many eco-worriers—at least the ones willing to talk about it—are women. Mental-health experts might point out that women tend toward much higher levels of anxiety and depression than men do. Maybe. But what’s inarguable is that we do more household shopping, pack more lunches, and make more rainforest dioramas for third-grade science classes. We are the moms, and worrying is part of our job description. “We have an attachment to the future through our children,” says psychologist Dr. Miriam Greenspan, author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair. “We want to believe they will be healthy, and that their children will be healthy and have a future. The loss of faith in this gives us the sense that our future is threatened, and so we’re grieving.”
For Kimberly Danek Pinkson, founder of the San Anselmo–based EcoMom Alliance, triggers for obsessiveness can range from bottled water to Hollywood’s take on the apocalypse. “I get images of The Terminator, where everyone has to wear gas masks and the sky is dark gray.” (In those movies, of course, the hero is a mom, and her sidekick is the future governor of California—an eco-worrier’s fantasy come true.) Pinkson adds, “I think of my son, Corbin, not being able to go to Hawaii and Yosemite, places I have a strong connection to—they’ll be underwater or just not accessible. Those are the scripts that I have to turn off.”
And there’s the script we all dread: What
to tell the children? How do you explain Happy Feet or The Polar Bear’s Home: A Story About Global Warming? How do you prepare them for a future so different that it seems impossible to imagine—without freaking them out? “My five-year-old saw about five minutes of An Inconvenient Truth, which was probably a mistake,” says Nancy Hoopes, a San Francisco therapist. “She’s young, but sophisticated enough to understand it was very scary. Ever since watching it, she says she likes living up on a hill, so when the water comes up, we’ll be above it.”
As Hoopes knows well from treating patients with mood disorders, classic anxiety and depression often lead to an inability to feel anything like joy. Eco-worry has had the same effect on her. “How nice it would be to watch the Blue Angels without thinking about all the fossil fuels, and how we’ve wasted so much and polluted so much,” she says. “Or going to Twin Peaks at night and looking at the view. I can’t enjoy the view of city lights, because all I can think is that they shouldn’t be on.” She adds, “It makes it hard to do anything day to day.”
For Elaine Hayes, an East Bay mother of two, trying to be so good all the time has left her not just joyless, but paralyzed and mentally exhausted. She and her husband, John, built a “green” house in 2006, but their eco-vigilance hardly stops there. There’s the question of what to have for dinner: Her husband is a vegan, and Elaine tries to avoid red meat, but at the fish counter, she says, “I cannot keep up with what fish is OK to eat, between the safe farming practices and the mercury.” She checks every label for GMO, soy, lecithin, and any added corn, soy, or canola oil. “This is on top of all the other things we check for: organic ingredients, no corn syrup, trans fats, high sugar content, overly processed wheat instead of whole grain, eggs laid from free and happy hens, chickens who were free-range and well fed during their short little lives.”
She washes every plastic bag. “But then I wonder about the germs that don’t get washed out, and if I am sickening my family. I have secretly been known to rip holes in the bags, just to have an excuse to throw them out.” Sometimes she even runs the dishwasher when it’s not totally full. “I just say, ‘Fuck it,’ and I feel guilty and defiant at the same time. How
As Hoopes knows well from treating patients with mood disorders, classic anxiety and depression often lead to an inability to feel anything like joy. Eco-worry has had the same effect on her. “How nice it would be to watch the Blue Angels without thinking about all the fossil fuels, and how we’ve wasted so much and polluted so much,” she says. “Or going to Twin Peaks at night and looking at the view. I can’t enjoy the view of city lights, because all I can think is that they shouldn’t be on.” She adds, “It makes it hard to do anything day to day.”
For Elaine Hayes, an East Bay mother of two, trying to be so good all the time has left her not just joyless, but paralyzed and mentally exhausted. She and her husband, John, built a “green” house in 2006, but their eco-vigilance hardly stops there. There’s the question of what to have for dinner: Her husband is a vegan, and Elaine tries to avoid red meat, but at the fish counter, she says, “I cannot keep up with what fish is OK to eat, between the safe farming practices and the mercury.” She checks every label for GMO, soy, lecithin, and any added corn, soy, or canola oil. “This is on top of all the other things we check for: organic ingredients, no corn syrup, trans fats, high sugar content, overly processed wheat instead of whole grain, eggs laid from free and happy hens, chickens who were free-range and well fed during their short little lives.”
She washes every plastic bag. “But then I wonder about the germs that don’t get washed out, and if I am sickening my family. I have secretly been known to rip holes in the bags, just to have an excuse to throw them out.” Sometimes she even runs the dishwasher when it’s not totally full. “I just say, ‘Fuck it,’ and I feel guilty and defiant at the same time. How
sick is that, and who am I really defying?”
Meanwhile, Hayes still hasn’t been able to create the home office she wants. “My desk is a mess, with piles of things I would like to put on a bulletin board, but the glues in regular bulletin boards are too toxic. I also am sitting on a crappy, really uncomfortable chair at my desk, which deters me from doing any long-term projects, because I need to find a nontoxic, environmentally friendly desk chair.”
Underneath the lethargy, Hayes’s resentment is palpable—not directed at the corporate evildoers who pour their poisons into innocent, unsuspecting furniture, but at her husband. As hard as Hayes tries to limit her footprint on the planet, he wants her to tread even more softly. “He represents the whole movement in his dogmatic practices. He’ll silently change all the bulbs in the house, so when I go to turn on the light, which used to give a beautiful and pleasant glow, I am accosted by fluorescent lights’ weak and hideous green glow. It is enough to make me scream.” It also makes her feel more guilty—as if she needed that. “I feel like a spoiled, indulgent, and superficial energy hog because I just want my incandescent bulb.”
I’m reminded of what comedian Larry David said when asked about his recent split from eco-superstar (and Inconvenient Truth producer) Laurie David: “I went home and turned all the lights on!”
Put another way: What happens after an eco-worrier has changed all the lightbulbs?
Burnout.
Meanwhile, Hayes still hasn’t been able to create the home office she wants. “My desk is a mess, with piles of things I would like to put on a bulletin board, but the glues in regular bulletin boards are too toxic. I also am sitting on a crappy, really uncomfortable chair at my desk, which deters me from doing any long-term projects, because I need to find a nontoxic, environmentally friendly desk chair.”
Underneath the lethargy, Hayes’s resentment is palpable—not directed at the corporate evildoers who pour their poisons into innocent, unsuspecting furniture, but at her husband. As hard as Hayes tries to limit her footprint on the planet, he wants her to tread even more softly. “He represents the whole movement in his dogmatic practices. He’ll silently change all the bulbs in the house, so when I go to turn on the light, which used to give a beautiful and pleasant glow, I am accosted by fluorescent lights’ weak and hideous green glow. It is enough to make me scream.” It also makes her feel more guilty—as if she needed that. “I feel like a spoiled, indulgent, and superficial energy hog because I just want my incandescent bulb.”
I’m reminded of what comedian Larry David said when asked about his recent split from eco-superstar (and Inconvenient Truth producer) Laurie David: “I went home and turned all the lights on!”
Put another way: What happens after an eco-worrier has changed all the lightbulbs?
Burnout.
Chapter 5:
Eco-worrier to eco-warrior
CBS 5 television anchor Wendy Tokuda reminds me a lot of me: “obsessive” and “bossy” (her description of herself, not mine). A fanatical recycler and composter, she put solar panels on her roof and installed Oakland’s first (permitted) gray-water system, and she regularly plucks cans out of colleagues’ trash cans. (“It’s a compulsive thing, but it can have really bad results. People leave chewing gum on them.”) But over the years, says Tokuda, she’s discovered it’s best to lead by example. “I’ve found self-righteous behav-ior often backfires.”
When she recently remarried, Tokuda and her groom went so far as to pledge tolerance and forgiveness for any enviro-obsessed behavior. “When I met John, he didn’t recycle,” Tokuda says. In the ceremony, she vowed “to love you even if you don’t
recycle plastic bottles.” John, in turn, vowed “to love you even if you go in the garbage and pull out plastic bottles.”
How does an extreme eco-worrier learn, as Tokuda has, to embrace a mellower approach? There’s always Prozac and Xanax, of course, but Commonweal’s Lerner says a better first step is to put our current plight, however serious, in perspective. Lerner, who deals with death all the time through the organization’s renowned hospice program, notes that if we look back on human history, “the sense that humanity was living at a turning point, and that disaster was threatening, goes back at least to biblical times, 3,000 years ago. Be it the plague in the Middle Ages or the threat of nuclear annihilation following World War II”—or AIDS in the last 20 years—“people have experienced intense anxiety about the future and health of the human species.”
So what to do with our current fears that—in the end—are about the end, about loss and annihilation? “We can serve the cause of life on earth better if we move through our anxiety, and if we find an underlying place within ourselves that acknowledges the reality of the tragedy we are facing and, at the same time, commits to doing whatever each of us can do to move beyond this tragedy,” Lerner adds. “This situation is too serious to afford us the luxury of remaining stuck in anxiety. We have an obligation to move toward hope and commitment.”
A big part of making that move is letting go of the notion that we can force other people to change as quickly as we’d like, eco-therapists say. “It’s like in The Matrix: Once you take the red pill, you get so frustrated that they’re asleep,” says Buzzell, who calls this the “waking up” syndrome. “But then you start to realize that you can only do what you can. First you can start with yourself and hope everyone gets there in their own time.”
As therapist Hoopes has discovered, cutting herself a certain amount of slack is an equally important part of the process. Hoopes, despite or perhaps because of her self-imposed privations, recently rented her daughter a jumpy house for her birthday—the environmental equivalent of someone in Weight Watchers who polishes off a dozen Krispy Kremes in one sitting. She ticks off all the reasons she should feel bad: “It’s prob- ably made in China, with all those chemicals.
How does an extreme eco-worrier learn, as Tokuda has, to embrace a mellower approach? There’s always Prozac and Xanax, of course, but Commonweal’s Lerner says a better first step is to put our current plight, however serious, in perspective. Lerner, who deals with death all the time through the organization’s renowned hospice program, notes that if we look back on human history, “the sense that humanity was living at a turning point, and that disaster was threatening, goes back at least to biblical times, 3,000 years ago. Be it the plague in the Middle Ages or the threat of nuclear annihilation following World War II”—or AIDS in the last 20 years—“people have experienced intense anxiety about the future and health of the human species.”
So what to do with our current fears that—in the end—are about the end, about loss and annihilation? “We can serve the cause of life on earth better if we move through our anxiety, and if we find an underlying place within ourselves that acknowledges the reality of the tragedy we are facing and, at the same time, commits to doing whatever each of us can do to move beyond this tragedy,” Lerner adds. “This situation is too serious to afford us the luxury of remaining stuck in anxiety. We have an obligation to move toward hope and commitment.”
A big part of making that move is letting go of the notion that we can force other people to change as quickly as we’d like, eco-therapists say. “It’s like in The Matrix: Once you take the red pill, you get so frustrated that they’re asleep,” says Buzzell, who calls this the “waking up” syndrome. “But then you start to realize that you can only do what you can. First you can start with yourself and hope everyone gets there in their own time.”
As therapist Hoopes has discovered, cutting herself a certain amount of slack is an equally important part of the process. Hoopes, despite or perhaps because of her self-imposed privations, recently rented her daughter a jumpy house for her birthday—the environmental equivalent of someone in Weight Watchers who polishes off a dozen Krispy Kremes in one sitting. She ticks off all the reasons she should feel bad: “It’s prob- ably made in China, with all those chemicals.
Then all the electricity it uses—it’s like a gigantic blow-dryer. Plus the fact that someday it will be going into a landfill.”
Sure enough, she says, “People made fun of it, and one of the preschool teachers said it changed his view of me. I’m trying to get people to keep their plastic forks separate from their napkins that will go into recycling, and then I rent a bouncy house.” But Hoopes adds, “If we aren’t having joy in our lives, then we aren’t going to be able to maintain the energy to make changes in the world. You have to be able to live your life. If it’s always about having to save the world, we’d quit.”
Next, Hoopes wants to form a community-based environmental group that will work to make a difference. “Guilt is so unproductive. I think it’s a way to avoid feelings like fear, anger, frustration, and sadness. But uncomfortable emotions have the potential to inspire action and bring people together in working toward change.”
It sounds awfully “Kumbaya,” but Hoopes may have found the answer other eco-worriers are searching for. Group action is the most effective antidepressant yet discovered, says Molly Young Brown, a well-known eco-psychologist and environmental writer: “We got into this mess collectively, and for a person to try to resolve it alone is inefficient.” Says Hanna Levenson, a clinical psychologist who practices in San Francisco and Oakland, “taking some sort of action really does help alleviate the anxiety and the depression, because it combats the helplessness and the hopelessness.”
“There’s a great joy in being in service
Sure enough, she says, “People made fun of it, and one of the preschool teachers said it changed his view of me. I’m trying to get people to keep their plastic forks separate from their napkins that will go into recycling, and then I rent a bouncy house.” But Hoopes adds, “If we aren’t having joy in our lives, then we aren’t going to be able to maintain the energy to make changes in the world. You have to be able to live your life. If it’s always about having to save the world, we’d quit.”
Next, Hoopes wants to form a community-based environmental group that will work to make a difference. “Guilt is so unproductive. I think it’s a way to avoid feelings like fear, anger, frustration, and sadness. But uncomfortable emotions have the potential to inspire action and bring people together in working toward change.”
It sounds awfully “Kumbaya,” but Hoopes may have found the answer other eco-worriers are searching for. Group action is the most effective antidepressant yet discovered, says Molly Young Brown, a well-known eco-psychologist and environmental writer: “We got into this mess collectively, and for a person to try to resolve it alone is inefficient.” Says Hanna Levenson, a clinical psychologist who practices in San Francisco and Oakland, “taking some sort of action really does help alleviate the anxiety and the depression, because it combats the helplessness and the hopelessness.”
“There’s a great joy in being in service
to something,” agrees psychologist Greenspan. “It’s much better than getting angry with your husband for his long shower and your neighbor for her big car. We may not see dramatic changes because of something we do, but we have a sense we’re contributing.”
Chapter 6:
The zen of a bad situation
It may seem counterintuitive, but environmentalists—the very folks who think the most about the planet’s fate—are the least panic-stricken by what they foresee (at least on the surface). Instead of being anxious, the ones I talked to seem frankly relieved that people are finally paying attention to what they’ve been trying to tell us for years. “I think it can be harder for those who aren’t activists,” says Russell Long, vice president of San Francisco–based Friends of the Earth. “They aren’t doing something to solve the problem.” Long, who has spent his 18-year career fighting everything from smoking to gas emissions, says it’s not he, but his girlfriend—to whom he delivers bad news daily over dinner—who is “constantly in a mild state of depression about the environment.” Long says that while he knows he can’t change the world single-handedly, it helps him to remember the story of the mother and daughter who find thousands of starfish stranded on the beach. The daughter throws one back into the sea, and the mother says, “That’s not going to help.” The daughter answers, “But it will help that one.”
That’s a similar attitude adopted by EcoFabulous.com founder (and Marin resident) Zem Joaquin, the current doyenne of conscientious consumerism. Joaquin says she’s such a worrier that she can’t even read The Lorax to her two kids—her husband has to do it. “Every once in a while, I say, ‘Oh God, we’re screwed.’ ” To some cynics, running a website devoted to shopping may not seem like the most useful way to save a planet, but she figures that helping others become thoughtful consumers, without nagging or browbeating or piling on the guilt, is far more effective than the alternative. “If I did nothing,” she says, “if I just sat around, I think I’d be suicidal.”
As for Michelle Bodwell, she’s also taking action. She attended an intensive, two-weekend seminar with Berkeley-based eco-anxiety guru Joanne Macy, but came away with mixed feelings: There was plenty of navel gazing among those in her workshop, but not enough calls for real progress.
Right now, she’s working toward a degree as a therapist with an emphasis on deep ecology, the so-called “ecosophy” that posits that all living creatures on earth have an equal right to thrive. (The movement’s leading thinker is a Bay Area resident, of course: Fritjof Capra, the author of The Tao of Physics.) In the end, says Bodwell, “I have a sense that things are going to be all right. That doesn’t necessarily mean the survival of all species, or even our species. But
Chapter 6:
The zen of a bad situation
It may seem counterintuitive, but environmentalists—the very folks who think the most about the planet’s fate—are the least panic-stricken by what they foresee (at least on the surface). Instead of being anxious, the ones I talked to seem frankly relieved that people are finally paying attention to what they’ve been trying to tell us for years. “I think it can be harder for those who aren’t activists,” says Russell Long, vice president of San Francisco–based Friends of the Earth. “They aren’t doing something to solve the problem.” Long, who has spent his 18-year career fighting everything from smoking to gas emissions, says it’s not he, but his girlfriend—to whom he delivers bad news daily over dinner—who is “constantly in a mild state of depression about the environment.” Long says that while he knows he can’t change the world single-handedly, it helps him to remember the story of the mother and daughter who find thousands of starfish stranded on the beach. The daughter throws one back into the sea, and the mother says, “That’s not going to help.” The daughter answers, “But it will help that one.”
That’s a similar attitude adopted by EcoFabulous.com founder (and Marin resident) Zem Joaquin, the current doyenne of conscientious consumerism. Joaquin says she’s such a worrier that she can’t even read The Lorax to her two kids—her husband has to do it. “Every once in a while, I say, ‘Oh God, we’re screwed.’ ” To some cynics, running a website devoted to shopping may not seem like the most useful way to save a planet, but she figures that helping others become thoughtful consumers, without nagging or browbeating or piling on the guilt, is far more effective than the alternative. “If I did nothing,” she says, “if I just sat around, I think I’d be suicidal.”
As for Michelle Bodwell, she’s also taking action. She attended an intensive, two-weekend seminar with Berkeley-based eco-anxiety guru Joanne Macy, but came away with mixed feelings: There was plenty of navel gazing among those in her workshop, but not enough calls for real progress.
Right now, she’s working toward a degree as a therapist with an emphasis on deep ecology, the so-called “ecosophy” that posits that all living creatures on earth have an equal right to thrive. (The movement’s leading thinker is a Bay Area resident, of course: Fritjof Capra, the author of The Tao of Physics.) In the end, says Bodwell, “I have a sense that things are going to be all right. That doesn’t necessarily mean the survival of all species, or even our species. But
when I look at the history of the earth, with all its catastrophes, I realize that everything dies, and then something new is born. When I look at it in that global way, I don’t feel so panicked. But if I drop down to a more human level, then all over again, I’m weeping about the loss of a single polar bear. It becomes a personal loss, I think, because I’ve allowed myself to love this earth so much.”
Leslie Crawford is a regular contributor to San Francisco. Her last story, “Deconstructing Eco-Chic,” ran in March 2007.
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