EcoMoms

For some time I’ve been meaning to blog about trying to be an environmentally-conscious family, so I was pleased when The New York Times published “For EcoMoms, Saving Earth Begins at Home.” In many ways, the article itself points to the contradictions and challenges of trying to live simply in the United States.

First, the good news: an increasing number of mothers (as well as fathers and non-parents, in my observation) are talking with each other about how to reduce their impact on the environment. I was heartened to read that in California, mothers are doing this in groups—and not just Quaker committees. The article describes the EcoMom party as the new Tupperware party, a chance for women to gather and talk over a glass of wine. The fact that they are encouraging and challenging each other to make more environmentally friendly choices is great. Any difficult change is easier with peer support, and countering the consumer orientation of our culture is certainly difficult.

The difficulty is reflected in what seems to me a slightly snide tone on the part of the article’s author, Patricia Leigh Brown. Maybe I’m over sensitive, but I hear a hint of mockery in this and other sentences:

Perhaps not since the days of “dishpan hands” has the household been so all-consuming. But instead of gleaming floors and sparkling dishes, the obsession is on installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, buying in bulk and using “smart” power strips that shut off electricity to the espresso machine, microwave, X-Box, VCR, coffee grinder, television and laptop when not in use.

Perhaps Brown is simply worried that changing all the light bulbs is going to fall on the mothers, and she doesn’t want women burdened with any more to feel guilty about. But even more than the reference to “dishpan hands” it is the use of the word “obsession” that feels dismissive. Surely we have moved past the time when environmental activists were seen as hysterics, obsessed with irrational fears. Or maybe this is a stereotype about women. My friend Laura Levitt, a well-respected feminist scholar, just arrived in the coffee shop where I am writing and affirmed my suspicions. “The Times is always dismissive of groups of women,” says Laura. “If a bunch of men were doing it, they would think it was great.”

Of course, it’s possible that the author’s tone isn’t directed at the women at all, but at the lavish consumerism they are attempting to moderate. In the sentence quoted above, there are seven gadgets hooked up to the smart power strip, which is a subtle way of pointing to the contradiction posed by the affluent EcoMoms profiled in the article. The picture of the gathering makes the point as well. These are rich White women in big luxurious houses. Brown explains, “One of the country’s wealthiest places, Marin County, is hardly a hub of voluntary simplicity; its global footprint, according to county statistics, is 27 acres per person, a measure of the estimated amount of land it takes to support each person’s lifestyle (24 is the American average).”

What Brown leaves out are the global statistics that show that most of us are more like the Marin County mothers than we’d like to admit. To put this in a little perspective, here is a graph that shows ecological footprints around the world, in hectares, rather than acres:

The average American footprint is nearly nine times as large as the average African. Given the earth’s limited resources, limiting our consumption can be seen as a matter of justice, as well as survival.

Although this bigger global perspective is missing from the Times piece, and by implication from the Marin County EcoMom meetings, I still think mothers talking about how to reduce their carbon emissions is a good thing, even if it does cause a little "ecoanxiety." (I hadn’t even thought about the dry-erase markers emitting toxins before reading this article, but I don’t feel up to convincing our school to replace the dry-erase markers that every child uses for math.) Instead of the "ecotherapists" referred to in the piece, we need communities where we can challenge and support each other, not in the bitchy way Brown hints at in her article, but in the way John Woolman encouraged his fellow Quakers to give up their slaves, with love. By working together, we can also challenge our politicians to make the policy decisions that will have an even greater impact than any of us can acting alone.

It's the prospect of supportive community that I took out of this article. It's been pretty lonely being the only family on the block that composts, yet in my Quaker meeting I compare myself to some of the single people who live much less wasteful lives than mine, and I am hit with that "ecoanxiety" syndrom. Talking with other parents about what we can reasonably do seems like a good next step. Maybe we can start in the blogosphere so none of us has to drive to another meeting.