Last Thursday, I sat down with a small group of friends to watch the L.A. installment of the PBS show, Edens Lost and Found. I wanted to love it, really I did; or at least like it. It featured people I admire (TreePeople’s Andy Lipkis for one, former Assemblywoman Cindy Montañez, for another), but in truth, I was bored. 
Bored with Jimmy Smits’ puzzlingly monotone commentary; with the happy tears of the young urban gardeners in the Boyle Heights’ club “Girls Today, Women Tomorrow” (GTWT); with the whole notion that Los Angeles is a hotbed of environmental activism (I have been to such hotbeds, and this isn’t one of them). I even suggested a title change: Opportunities Found and Squandered, because I couldn’t imagine that anyone would pay attention to this kind of one-dimensional civic back-slapping unless they had to.
At first, two of these three friends – urban environmentalists themselves who compost, recycle and conserve as a matter of course – disagreed. They resented my idea that the GTWT would have been better had the women had, oh, a fight, or if there’d been some struggle to keep their club and gardens going. But when the third friend, another writer with little more than a theoretical interest in living the Green Life, admitted that left to himself he would have turned off the television, the enviro couple had to relent – although they still didn’t think you had to pump up conflicts just to make a story alluring. Instead, they argued that the average person just isn’t all that interested in environmentalism. “Our neighbor is a wonderful person, but she doesn’t recycle,” the woman of the pair told me. “We asked her about it, and she just said ‘Oh, we don’t do that.’ And that was it.” To talk to her about it, we agreed, would have been preachy and pointless.
Not to mention hypocritical, in a way: For everything I think I do to lessen my impact on the planet, there are a hundred ways in which I fall short (at the tail end of my recent move from a house in the Hollywood Hills to a tiny mid-city apartment, for example, I found myself muttering “fuck recycling” as I tossed out huge bags of trash).
And that’s often how Edens Lost and Found felt to me, with its long segments on that righteous revolutionary, Ed Begley, and his “modest” house (it looked huge to me), and public-relations pitch from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who, let it be known, gets himself driven around town in a Big Black GMC Yukon.
So then, how do we talk about this stuff? It’s an age-old problem: How do we get people to recycle, to drive less, to stop dumping their motor oil down storm drains? How do we get them to pick up their plastic bags in the city, their cigarette butts on the trail, their dog poop on the sidewalk? And how do we convince them to do these things without causing their eyes to glaze over?
In other words, what kind of stories do we have to tell to get people interested in the environment?
And how do we tell those stories well enough to make them sexy? Does toxic black smoke really have to fell people in London before we stop burning coal? Do men and women both have to stop reproducing, à la Children of Men, before we ban hormone-disrupting chemicals from our plastics? Does Florida have to go underwater before we stop driving Hummers? (Then again, there's always that "amphibious Hummer" option.)
It’s with that question on my mind that I’m re-launching this blog after a long and reflective holiday hiatus. In the time that I’ve been galumphing around looking for the hook on which to hang my online reflections, a lot has happened to make this question more urgent than ever. Nature, as Al Gore once told me, is her own best marketing rep (actually, he said "she has a voice in this debate," but I like my version better), and the signs of a changing climate, as well as the increasing toxicity of our environment, have become impossible to ignore, even for that oily old sod, James “greatest hoax” Inhofe of Oklahoma. Crocuses have begun springing up in New York City in the winter; snow has fallen in Malibu (that’s why they call it “climate change,” and not, necessarily, “global warming.”) Greenland is melting, the oceans are dying, polar bears are starving and cancer rates are soaring.
Today, Schwarzenegger signed a bill into the law requiring steep cuts in the carbon content of fuels beginning in December 2008 (a boon to the ethanol market, at least), and Rep. Nancy Pelosi proposed creating a house committee on global warming. And still, if someone sends me one more story about climate change, no matter how eloquent and transporting (like this one from Mark Wedin of the Amsterdam Weekly), I fear I will rend my garments and run naked and screaming into the street – because the news is so bleak and frustrating, and because it feels to me that it’s the one thing I can’t do a goddamn thing about on my own.
Which is another reason to keep asking this question: Some of these problems we can only solve as a unit. But how do we persuade that unit to act?
I’ll be blogging from now on every Monday and Thursday evenings, with emergency dispatches now and then, but not often. Next post: Setting the stage for next Tuesday’s State of the Union, Bush’s annual giving of lip-service to that thorny thing called “energy independence.” And, of course, why you should care.
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Now see, you were right! The only reason I read your article was because you intrigued me by promising to compare environmentalism and sex. So, I get your point. This is especially relevant to me because, as a senior citizen, I had decided to devote my retirement time this year to becoming more of an “online environmentalist”. I was going to start forwarding all of the scarey e-mail of environmental warnings to my friends and entreat them to respond with instant activism. But as you say, they will probably start deleting my e-mail as soon as they see it’s from me, their environmental-nazi friend. So maybe I shall have to sugar-coat these dire warnings, perhaps with satirical anecdotes or pictures of “naturists”. And by the way………………what IS the difference between environmentalism and sex? Keep up the good work, Judith. I’ll be rootin’ for ya. Tiff Henderson, 62
Posted on January 19, 2007 1:01 PM by Tiffeney Henderson
What a great post. You're asking The Important Questions. And there are bears! I'm with Tiffeney -- rootin' for ya and also wondering what IS the difference? Youth wants to know.
Posted on January 19, 2007 8:01 PM by mernitman
You even got the immediate attention of policymakers! :)
It's funny you used that coupling of "environment" and "sexy" as earlier this week I gave a speech this week at the unveiling of the first LEED Platinum home in the U.S., which is a very sexy house as well as a phenomenal environmental accomplishment (albeit at the high end of the housing market, though its manufacturer is working with Enterprise, the nation's biggest funder of affordable housing, to bring green building to the less expensive end of the market, too.) I made the point that green and sexy can go together if we do it right, which you are helping to do by starting this conversation.
Every time I get similarly distressed, I find some counterbalancing and unexpected environmental gesture swing me back to an optimistic and recommitted practitioner. As a councilmember, I am consistently visited by youth during my office hours who I have never met. These children and young adults come to talk to me about the environment--they want to take neighborhood-level actions to change the urban and world environment that they share. One elementary school girl from Silver Lake wanted to attack trash and she worked with us to launch an anti-trash initiative that put beautiful trash cans throughout the neighborhood that local kids and artists designed and which the city picks up, helping us get trash out of our stormdrains and waterways. Yesterday, I got an invitation from a young neighbor to come to his 11th birthday party that reminded me that he was the "global warming kid" who had visited me last year in my office. I don't have the space to bore you here with all the similar experiences I have had, but I have found young people in this city to be joining an increasing hotbed of environmental activism.
If anything, our successes educating youth in this country about environmental issues should make collective action pretty simple.
In my own neighborhood, plastic bags to help folks pick up after their dogs in Elysian Park are now everywhere--and these came from regular residents. This wasn't the case a few years ago. The community garden movement is now in so many places that we take it for granted, but if you drop by Jardin del Rio (in Elysian Valley next to the LA River), you won't find a group of weird enviros, you will find the everyday residents of that neighborhood going about their unremarkable but impactful contribution to the greening of the city.
And there is growing political will to get behind an environmentalism that is part of everything that we do too. This past week, we allocated money to complete a comprehensive environmental plan for the city of Los Angeles. I have to admit, as someone who has wanted to do this in the past, that I was skeptical of this latest effort if it didn't have a popular participation and marketing element (which we added). Government can do some amazing and pretty profound things (as we have in Los Angeles), but Angelenos can do exponentially more. So I am focused in the coming year in a citywide environmental project that would engage, educate, and activate Angelenos. We are talking to some of the best marketing people in the city about similar efforts We have the ingredients for mass participation: Green Power from DWP, expedited permitting for green building (and the moves towards mandatory LEED construction in the city), the Million Trees initiative, the beginning of our expansion of recycling to apartments, and ongoing (and free) composting workshops. This, together, with a few billion dollars we will get to spend on transportation and the kind of urban planning that will help folks out of their cars, we just do a lousy job of knitting all of this together. If there was one recognizable program ("brand"), that schoolkids and the rest of us recognized alike, we'd be able to jumpstart many of these initiatives.
But don't dispair: from the Apollo Alliance, the watershed movement, the unveiling of the Los Angeles River Master Plan in about two months (after a LOT of popular participation), the opening of Taylor Yards, and much much more, this is going to be a green year. I know I risk sounding like the very civic green backslapping you criticized earlier, but most of these things have been ground-up initiatives, not top-down. And they are no longer on the fringes: they are squarely in our civic mainstream.
Posted on January 20, 2007 9:01 AM by Eric Garcetti
If not sex, how about economics. If Wal-Mart can come to the conclusion that conservation is not a personal virtue, as Dick Cheney put it, but a way to cut costs and increase profit margins (and generate good PR), then perhaps conservation should actually be marketed for its financial benefits. A home owner's carbon footprint is invisible but dollar savings are not. Cynical, perhaps, but if our future depends on personal virtue we are in a lot of trouble.
And what about holding architects to account? If Frank Gehry could do for solar panels what he has done for stainless steel, conservation could be economical and sexy.
Posted on January 21, 2007 7:01 AM by corinth
I think it is a mistake to think that a large, modern , industrial city will ever be fully "greened" in our lifetimes or the next few generations. That is not to say that LA or other cities eco-impact can't be greatly reduced, but the infrastructure is anathema to complete ecological harmony.
i do agree that its not a very sexy issue(althought envrironmental activists tend to be having more sex than any other group I know - especially the Wiccans). People feel guilty about their consumption and its impacts and the practitioners of a greener lifestyle are often rather preachy about it. It is really hard to know the true impact of your purchases our your daily actions and its exhausting trying to figure it out.
The issues are more interesting when their are bigger than life villains, like Enron or Pacific Lumber, but it is hard to focus when it is just average people living their normal lives and slowly, incrementaly degrading the planet. I'm optimistic - there is lots we can do, but it is hard to make the environment a legislative priority.
For instance, British economists and ecologists said there's still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we immediately invest 1 percent of world economic activity (GDP) into reducing the impact of global warming.
Good luck with your blogging.
Posted on January 22, 2007 3:01 AM by marc evans
Hi Tiffeney: Thanks for breaking the comment ice. The answer to the "what's the difference" question: People tend to click on one of those words more frequently than the other. I thnk you're on the right track with your "sugar-coating" idea -- let me know how it goes.
Mernitman: Thanks for visiting, the encouragement and the inspiration. See above for an answer to the riddle. If you still don't get it, I'll try to find another way to explain it to you . . .
Councilmember Garcetti: Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. I think you're totally on target emphasizing local community involvement, which is a much more concrete (and less frustrating) way to make an impact than to attack problems on this sort of vague, global scale. I'd like to find out more about this comprehensive environmental plan (and its marketing) soon. It sounds like story fodder.
corinth: Have you read Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent profile of Amory Lovins in this week's New Yorker? It's all about what you say: It's to our economic benefit to reduce, recycle and promote reneweable energy. And some architects are starting to get it -- see the councilmember's post above about those sexy LEED buildings . . .
Hi marc evans -- the way L.A. is built definitely impedes green progress, and I didn't know that British estimate -- one percent doesn't seem like that much; it seems like we should be able to do that. Thanks for the good wishes, and I hope you return and weigh in more. Do Wiccans really have a lot of sex?
Posted on January 22, 2007 5:01 PM by Judith Lewis
Glad you're back. This blog is a good place to get good info in a few minutes- like grist- and as has been suggested, a few minutes of this kind of news is often all that one can take.
Being green is sexy. But how to talk to other people without preaching and how to live green and stay joyful...that's hard. And that's what resonants most with me, and i think they are related problems that can be addressed, let's not say solved, with increased attention to one fact. Individuals can do a great deal to reduce consumption and maintain some ecological balance, but if there is not collective action through government and pressure on corporate users and producers to change methods, then we're all fucked. I think we all know this, so some people do nothing and others try to do it all, and there is a constant sense of guilt and feeling of futility that one must hold at bay....the enviro movement as far as i can see has gotten pretty good at articulating the lifestyle side of green living but the corporate change aspect is lagging behind. And by the way, corporate America has gotten pretty good at making enviro degradation and disaster the problem of individual consumers too.
If you are riding your bike or using flourescent lightbulbs, composting, recycling, taking your own coffee cup into Starbucks, reading the newspaper on line, and so on and on and on GREAT. But write a letter to Chevron , make a phone call to the customer care line at Ford, participate in the corporate campaigns organized by groups like the PIRGs. Shift some of your energy and attention, and some of the blame, onto the market and institutional players because they have to change.
I try to live green because it's a way to stay loving and thinking in a world of contradiction, connected to the consequences, awake to the power that i do have. But the most important aspect of these actions, and the ones that I note above, is not that i use less, but that I send a signal to mega users and the powers that be that i want and expect something different, something green.
Thanks for a provocative post.
Posted on January 23, 2007 5:01 PM by Catherine