previous column next column back to archives
When I was in third grade, all my political beliefs mirrored those of my parents because I was stupid, and they seemed smart, and I guess it did make sense to vote for Bill Clinton because he played the saxophone with gusto sometimes. I also thought George Bush was dumb because he was a Republican, whatever that was.
And the environment – that was like a total disaster or something. Human beings were trashing the earth, and the only way to save it was to compost, recycle, use glass plates instead of paper, and eat Fruit Leather instead of Fruit Roll-Ups.
I was one of those kids that wasn’t allowed to have Cocoa Puffs, a Nintendo, or machine guns. In my mind, this was because all that stuff harmed the environment, but I lived on a dirt road in Maine and I was an only child, so common sense sometimes took longer than normal to reach me. You probably know people like me. We tend to be enormously successful writers, canvassers for obscure political parties, or CIA operatives who specialize in underwater demolition and socialite party crashing/espionage. I am, or have been, all three.
But when I was younger I was convinced that my upbringing was a sacrifice that was helping to save the world, specifically the ozone layer, the smog layer, and the aqua layer, where cartoon fish live and make instructional videos about turning off the faucet after you’re finished brushing your teeth. I thought other people should be making similar sacrifices.
One day, maybe at recess, I brought this issue up with a friend of mine, Mikey, who was cooler than me, and he looked me right in the eye and said, “I don’t believe in the environment.”
This rocked my world. Mikey was my best friend, and it was because of him that I wore cyclist hats and sweatpants. If he thought the environment wasn’t an issue worth caring about, or worse, that it didn’t exist, then why the hell had I been eating all that Fruit Leather?
One thing was certain: the environment, if it even existed, wasn’t cool.
Fifteen years later, things are different. It turns out my parents were right on most counts, and I still believe in the same ideals as they do, but we’re collectively cooler now. The environment does exist, and caring about it is the hot new trend. Even Mikey has come full circle: He’s now a slightly militant city planning grad student who recently held a job campaigning for urban cyclists’ rights.
On the cover of the latest Fortune magazine, Wal-Mart CEO Leo Scott is pictured holding a bucket of vegetables in front a cornfield. He is looking into the distance, or the future, or at a rustic farm that will soon be a Super Sam’s Club. Fortune’s caption reads, WAL-MART SAVES THE PLANET. As “out-of-character news stories” go, this one has to rank right up there with, “CASTRO SAVES DEMOCRACY,” “GIBSON ATTENDS BAR MITZVAH,” or “WHITE GOES ENTIRE DAY AT INTERNSHIP WITHOUT EATING CHICKEN BURRITO WITH SOUR CREAM FROM DONKEY EXPRESS, THEN SILENTLY FARTING FOR REST OF AFTERNOON.”
Then there’s Al Gore. Remember six years ago when everyone hated him because he was boring and quite possibly an alien robot who ate legal documents for sustenance? Now he’s like this cool, hip, occasionally bearded southern lumberjack, except instead of using his chainsaw to tear down trees, like most lumberjacks, he uses his saw to tear down people who think the environment doesn’t exist. Actually, maybe Al Gore isn’t a lumberjack.
But he is cool – like Paul Bunyan or the Bounty quicker-picker-upper guy.
I think Paul Bunyan is the Bounty quicker-picker-upper guy.
Well, he’s not.
Probably the coolest things in the world right now are hybrid cars. Owning a hybrid car is like having a Get Out of Jail Free card. Think about it – if you’re driving down a dark street on a Saturday night, at like three a.m., wasted on beer and magic mushrooms and dodging hallucinated mountain lions, and you swerve into a little kid, you’ll probably get away with it if you’re driving a Prius, because hey, at least you were trying to save the environment.
But if you were driving an H2, then there would probably be no trace of the human being you hit, and you would be able to drive into the woods, toppling trees and crushing boulders until you arrived somewhere in Greenland, safely out of range from the local police department. So you’ll still get away with it, but you’ll feel worse about yourself.
But before you go and jump on the green bandwagon, you should educate yourself. Watch An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car? Both documentaries are relevant and noteworthy depictions of our impending global train wreck, and I haven’t seen either of them, so you should send me Power Point plot summaries of both films, complete with illustrations and crashing car sounds with every new page.
Does global warming really exist?
Yes.
How do you know?
Because the last two days have been like two hundred degrees in Boston.
Why should something be done about it?
Because when the city is two hundred degrees, the streets near my workplace smell like hot rotting Chinese food.
Clearly something needs to be done, and the good news is, people are trying – people like Prius drivers, Al Gore, and Wal-Mart. But there is bad news as well. The bad news is that Wal-Mart is trying to help. And Wal-Mart is not cool.
Is it possible that the environment has jumped the shark, officially outlasting it’s trendy shelf life and becoming as hard to support as hip hop after my dad unleashed his “I’m a black rapper” dance in 1994*?
Thankfully, the answer is still no: The environment has not jumped the shark yet. And hopefully it won’t, not until we fix the hole in the ozone layer, remove the smog layer, and stop stealing water from the cartoon fish in the aqua layer.
The environment does exist, and we all need to acknowledge that, or else the whole world will begin to smell like hot rotting Chinese food. And that would NOT be cool.
*Picture a gay Jurassic Park Tyrannosaurus Rex trying to remove itself from a very large bear trap.
previous column next column back to archives
adam@theadamwhite.com |
