Green Hipsters

~ Laura

I spent some good time avoiding lecture-writing yesterday with the latest issue of Domino magazine. This month’s issue was devoted to being green and sustainable while still being hip. “101 things to do with hemp” and all that.

I don’t have any problem with sustainability. If we even buy our own car, rather than getting my dad’s castoffs, we’ll buy a Prius. When I was growing up, my folks went through a major organic farmer stage. If our backyard was big enough, I might even do a little composting. We’re a sucker for Trader Joe’s.

But when you mix the green lifestyle with post-heroin chic supermodels, it’s a little gag worthy.

The greenest people are totally unhip. They’re still wearing their clothes from twenty years ago. They aren’t keeping their home spa-worthy clean. No need to worry about polluting the air with chemicals, if you aren’t dusting every five minutes. They aren’t constantly renovating their kitchens and bathrooms, all of which uses enormous amounts of energy and resources; they are still living with the Formica numbers from the 70s. They aren’t jetting off to Europe to browse the Paris markets; they go bowling in the next town over. They aren’t constantly shopping for new things and tossing out the old things.

Domino really needs to put a slightly dumpy woman in her 60s on the cover surrounded by dusty Hummels and wearing stretch pants from Dress Barn.

Published by Laura

13 thoughts on “Green Hipsters”

  1. great post. the only thing that i would add is that a good portion of activities that are about “living green” are completely invisible. like replacing old inefficient furnaces and hot water heaters with new energy-star models. like plugging the leaks in your duct work. like putting insulation in your walls and changing out your windows.
    noone will know the difference except for you and your utility company.

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  3. Like keeping the (35 year old) rust colored sculptured plush carpet in the family room of the house I am in the process of buying? The house was lived in by a little old lady and the carpet is still in great shape…just an unfortunate mottled orange shade.

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  4. On the other hand, it’s not like green tut-tutting about the badness of consumerism has done much to slow the latter down over the years. Bruce Sterling pointed out years ago that only when the greenest products are also the best designed, most desirable objects around will there be some progress in that direction. Fighting the urge to splurge is a loser for greenery and for the environment.
    There’s direct methods, too. Germany’s just introduced a proposal for the excise tax on cars to be based on emissions, rather than value of the car. That goes right to people’s bottom lines.

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  5. After reading that recent article that said that organic produce may be more environmentally unfriendly given larger energy inputs to produce the same produce, I’m thinking that we consumers currently don’t have adequate information to judge the greenness or ungreenness of any particular product. I also think that we need to be more conscious of trade-offs. It might be nice to have a voluntary system of labels, explaining in what ways a product is and isn’t green.

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  7. But people don’t buy organic thinking it’s green, do they? they buy it thinking that it’s better for their health (which also may or may not be true). The problem with complicated labels is that they are complicated. There’s a growing body of psychological evidence that to much choice, too much information going into a decision making process cripples human ability to make decisions (other animals, too :-).
    I too think we underplay the trade-offs involved in all consumption and that we should have access to all the information, but not in the form of labels on products. Perhaps internet labels would do? We put important info on the product, and then allow people to read the fine print on the internet?
    Solar is hip in my neck of the woods (people are talking about installing personal solar on their own houses). I like solar for it’s hipness — there’s something inherently cool about drawing power from the sun. If I do it, I’ll know I’m going for the hip factor (not the status-hip, but the geek-hip factor), not contributing something significant to the environment. On the other hand, my mom saves old zip-loc bags, something that driving my crazy crazy crazy, but I recognize that the stingy re-users are more green than the the hip-spendy recyclers.
    bj

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  8. What about the water used in washing things for recycling? I really wonder about the tradeoffs involved in scrubbing out something like a glass jar of spaghetti sauce with caked-on tomato deposits. I also wonder about whether it’s such a good idea to be recycling containers that used to hold household chemicals, no matter what the package says. Is anyone out there calculating this stuff? My personal feeling is that that kind of water-intensive recycling is dumb in water-poor areas (like Southern California) but might be OK in wetter regions. Although even Seattle has water shortages…
    Aluminum recycling is a no-brainer, based on the huge amount of energy needed to turn aluminum ore into useful metal. However, I have major doubts about the earth-friendliness of distributing huge piles of newsprint to homes and then transporting it back to a recycling facility, creating who knows how much air pollution and toxic goo in the process. A week’s worth of newspapers is a huge, heavy pile. I would just pull the plug on the subscription, period.

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  9. I don’t know — it seems like a daunting thing, once you get past the big, easy stuff, to evaluate what is “worthwhile” green behavior and what is not.
    An example, from real life. I heat my house with wood. It’s wood from my family’s land, cut from fallen trees and dead trees and burned in a modern (two years old), reasonably efficient wood stove that is brand name, was professionally installed, and has a checkup (including flue cleaning) every year before heating season. On the plus side, this means that I heat with a reneweable resource and don’t consume very many fossil fuels in the process. (Some fossil fuel is used to run the chainsaw and to haul the loads of wood less-than-a-mile from the woods to my house in a truck.) On the down side, there are certainly particulate emissions from my fireplace and I’m not subject to the same clean-burning rules as electric companies are. My woodstove operates at something approaching 70% efficiency and it takes about ten 1.5′ diameter trees (already dead or on the ground, mind you) a year to heat my house. The woodlot, if you want to call it that, is five hundred acres of mostly-oak hardwood forest. I am not going to run out of trees in my lifetime even if there were none at all growing up to replace the ones I’m using. Is my woodstove BETTER for the environment than heating my (tiny, 24’x32′, well-insulated) house with electric baseboard? How can I tell without getting a damn graduate degree in methodologies of heating technology comparison and evaluating the ecological footprints of same?

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  11. Jessica, the wood stove is better. Any carbon emissions it emits were only accumulated during the lifetime of the tree so there will be the same amount of carbon as there was before the tree was there. If you replant a tree the carbon will get used back by the tree when growing.

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