The title may strike you as a funny thing for a liberal to say -- and I am a liberal. All the classical liberal principles just fit me like a glove, and I've never apologized for the word itself. I'm not a "progressive" or anything else. Just liberal.
But one word I never really applied to myself was "environmentalist." It's not that I didn't care about the earth. It was just a more philosophical thing than anything else.
For one thing, I didn't want to be a giant hypocrite. I didn't do any active harm to the planet. I wasn't pouring motor oil into storm drains or anything. But I knew I had a long way to go before I could ever hope to live up to the label. So I never really thought of myself as an environmentalist and I never made a conscious decision to be one.
Then one day as I was driving my Prius to the recycling center to drop off some glass bottles that used to be filled with locally sourced beer, it hit me. Holy crap, I'm an environmentalist.
Maybe this description doesn't fit you, but I'm sure we've all had a friend who has an "aha" moment and then says, "As FSM as my witness, I am an environmentalist!" Maybe they saw a video of chickens getting de-beaked in the '70s and swore off meat for a week or two. Maybe they watched the Al Gore movie (I never did) and started recycling -- then got lazy and eventually quit.
My point is, I've seen this go in reverse plenty of times. A well-meaning person makes a decision to do some things to help the planet, then, for whatever reason, runs out of energy and slides back into his or her old ways.
For me, it was the opposite. I can't point to a specific time where I made a commitment to live a greener life. It just happened gradually, over the course of maybe the last three years, I suppose.
And it all started with that gateway drug: backyard composting.
Now, my interest in composting was merely laziness. I was tired of taking the trash out so often, and I hated bagging up lawn waste to be carted to the dump. Sure, I had some vague notions about landfills filling up somewhere, but the main thing was laziness. Oh, and it was also an offshoot of my hobby: vegetable gardening.
So I read up on compost. What are browns and greens. What you can and can't put in your pile. What to do if your pile isn't heating up. Before long, I had a smoking pile and was using up almost all of my kitchen waste this way. I started noticing the trash bags filling up more slowly.
When I actually started using the finished compost in my garden and flowerbeds, the results were so good that I was able to stop spending money on Miracle Grow and other storebought garden chemicals. In short, I had become an organic gardener without really meaning to.
Things moved to the next level when I discovered a local company that would give me a recycling bin and take my items from the curb for me.
How cool! I got on the internet and learned what the plastic numbers mean. Before long I knew what HDPE stood for, and how to crush milk jugs between my knees so they take up less bin space. What I wasn't composting, I was recycling. So there was much less waste -- a pretty surprisingly small amount, actually.
Only problem was, the recycling company wouldn't take glass. So I started boxing up my bottles and jars and taking them up the road ever so often to be recycled. It gave it a sense of symmetry, you know? If I'm recycling paper and cans and plastic, I shouldn't just throw the glass away, right? Just seemed right.
We reused a lot of things too, often just to avoid a trip to the store or throwing something away. I used paper grocery bags to keep the weeds down in the garden and plastic grocery bags as lunch sacks or trash bags. I used old plastic shakers for Parmesan cheese as containers for the dried herbs I harvested from my garden. I used styrofoam egg containers as seed-starting trays. We got a lot of hand-me-down clothes for Droogie Jr. from relatives, to the point where he owned very few new clothes.
Then my wife got rear-ended in her car. It was totaled. So it was time to buy a new one.
The car got about 23 miles per gallon and I'd always wanted a car that got better than 30 MPG at least. Of course, fuel economy wasn't the only thing I cared about. It needed to be safe, too. I wanted my wife and my son to feel secure in their vehicle. We shopped around, and it turned out that the Toyota Prius we ended up buying made a lot of sense -- plus it got about 50 MPG.
The downside was the car payments were eating into our paychecks. So we re-instituted a few belt-tightening measures. Among other things, we were determined to use less electricity in our home. We sealed up a few drafty places in the house, got the twisty lightbulbs, kept the temperature a few degrees closer to "uncomfortable," made sure to turn out the lights more, and used less water. Our utility bills have dropped since then, and it really wasn't that hard.
When the recession started hitting Oklahoma, we started seeing people we knew losing their jobs. We resolved to help out local businesses by shopping at places that were locally owned (or at least regional chains).
We found products and services that were unique to the area -- including a Tulsa-owned brewery whose brew I mentioned earlier. It felt good to be helping our fellow Okies through a difficult time, but of course what we didn't even think about until later was how much this was helping the planet.
Every time you buy something local, that's a lot of gas that isn't burned up taking it from somewhere else. A lot of people take this knowledge for granted, but it wasn't something we thought about, like I said.
Then finally one day I was driving down to the recycling center in my Prius, and I had the epiphany. I believe it went something like, "Damn, when did I become Al Gore?"
Of course, there's still some areas where we could improve, and there are some areas where it just isn't possible for us to do any better -- at least at this point in our lives.
But since we've already become a family of composting, recycling, reusing, hybrid-driving, locally minded, energy-conscious, greenie-hippie-pinko bastards, we might as well go all the way with it, huh?
And I think it'll be easy too, because we haven't yet made a change that we weren't able to live with. In all, the whole transformation has been pretty simple. We've saved money, supported some good people, reduced our trash output and grown some tasty organic produce. It was not only simple, but also pretty fun.
I just never really intended to become an environmentalist, is all.