Standing in the check out lane of my neighborhood grocery store, I noticed this headline on the super-glossy cover of San Francisco Magazine, “It’s new. It’s green. It’s eco-anxiety.” The subheading promised to teach me how to “get past our free-floating guilt over global warming (plastic bags! polar bears!) and focus on what really matters.” Now, as someone who actually cares about the senseless ubiquity of plastic bags and polar bears drowning in the Arctic, I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps the article might treat these issues as neuroses of people who are “caring” too much and not having enough fun, rather than as legitimate concerns.
Those of us who consider ourselves environmentalists, or at least concerned about the human impact on the world we inhabit, (including many, many of us in the Bay Area), must certainly have felt a kind of green despair at some point. I feel them nearly every day, though I’m lucky that my worries don’t send me to the therapist, as has happened to certain people interviewed for the article. We are constantly thinking about our impact on the planet and, with humans’ incredibly poor choices in recent history, it’s easy to become distraught.
The answer to green worry, according to the article, is to recognize what you can change, and do your best to change those things, but also to recognize what cannot be changed. And, as the famous saying goes, the difficulty lies in distinguishing the two. I agree with the article in that I believe that the most good will come from each person focusing on their own choices and activities, and changing what they can change, to a reasonable extent. Education, or advocacy, is also extremely important. Otherwise, who of us would know how or what in our lives to change.
However, advocacy should not be condescending; it should be helpful and, where appropriate, fun. After all, the only reason I can call myself an environmentalist now is because someone along the way took me by the hand and showed me the impact of my choices and how I could do things differently. Rather than screeching at me about what an awful person I was for the choices I was making (and I guarantee I was making them in true, innocent ignorance of their results), this savior took me in with kindness and gave me the way.
But possibly the best way that I have found to overcome my green worry is to focus on the absolute wonder of the world, from the tiny ant with its intricate colonies to the galaxies that are thousands of light years across and hundreds of millions of light years from Earth. When I study the natural world and ponder its magnificence, I become peaceful and balanced. And the more peaceful and balanced I feel, the more I can summon the energy to help save what has given me such great tranquility.
I think this post is a perfect way to begin this new blog. I envision it as a combination of critique on the current state of affairs in terms of politics, society, and the law, and study of the wonder of the natural world. In that way, I hope to add a little balance, peace, and tranquility.
The article is available on San Francisco Magazine’s website, at http://www.sanfran.com/home/view_story/1895/
