brianvsbrain

Hi.

(You respond appropriately.)

This is my first time writing on a blog.

(“Oh, that’s nice,” you probably think.)

It is nice. But it also carries with it a lot of weight.

In writing this piece, I am instantly transformed. I am “green.” I am “wet behind the ears.” Obviously I know these are expressions meant to put me in my place, but I want to point out that physically, while the places behind my ears are not actually wet, someone did once tell me that I have an olive (I always assumed it was a green olive) tone to my skin (although personally I’m not totally convinced). Green on green. I think we’re off to a good start! To thicken the happenstance and serendipity of this already significant moment, I should point out that this, my maiden voyage into the world of the blog, is centered around nothing other than that ever increasingly significant color, green.

I want to make sure that we begin this thing on the right foot. I don’t want to enter into this reader/writer relationship with any wrong ideas or misunderstandings. You should know, from the very beginning, that I really don’t know anything. Even though I recently graduated with a college degree, I can’t conclusively say much. But please, keep reading, bear with me as I work to unlearn the stuffy language of academia and communicate with humans again. Chew on what I have to say. If it tastes bad, spit it out. If you like it, have some more, but know that the ideas are probably not my own. They are most likely the fragile descendants of other thoughts rarely finding their origins in me. They are the scrapings from the tables of great meals. I love great meals, but I also love leftovers. They’ve always held an important place in my life.

So, about Green.

This, the color of the day as it appears, is a growing figure in the language of our culture. Its hues represent a shift in the course of our daily existence, in the very makeup of our society. The revolution of green, which so many people hurriedly seek to wave as a banner above their products and their lives, is, often, not entirely understood. As automakers, business owners, and consumers alike begin to gravitate toward environmentally sustainable means of moving forward, they may be ingesting a bug. I say this from the most optimistic and encouraging angle I can – despite the potential of a painful and purging sickness.

The Green Revolution, as the movement has been appropriately hailed, is a beautiful thing with its roots firmly in the natural, healthy, functioning ideal of sustainability. That simple statement of fact is easy to take. What is more challenging is the fact that this movement is inherently subversive. In its character is the tendency to gradually wean away from the standards of dependency often commonplace in our market. Green undercuts the very system actively and eagerly swallowing its image. The greenification of our world carries with it an unspoken defiance of the conventional systems we’ve established over the last handful of decades. It inspires and directly leads toward sustainability, self-sufficiency, recycling and reusing of produced goods, less dependence on non-sustainable forms of energy, and reduction of waste and consumption. This movement has in it the potential to begin to unravel the consumptive culture of excess on which much of our market thrives. The more sustainable and lasting the product, and, more importantly, the more the public comes to demand sustainability, reusability, and quality, the less demand there will be to replace the countless failing and expiring products flooding landfills. Production and its associated economic growth could slow.

In keeping with the green theme, it’s timely that I should hear the buzzing of a lawnmower just outside my window right now. It perfectly captures the problem of environmental sustainability in the market place.

Actually… there is no buzz.

That’s because there is also no lawnmower. It’s January and I’m in Colorado. The grass is certainly not green and lawn mowers are nowhere to be found. Even if the grass was green and in need of a clipping, there is no grass just outside my window, only a weathered cement walkway. Regardless, somewhere a lawn needs mowing, and it is there where we can see the quandary in full effect. Let’s pretend that the owner of a green lawn is interested in becoming more self-sufficient; he begins to look into sustainable options for lawn care. He sees a classic push mower repackaged and marketed as a “green mower.” It requires no fuel to operate. He smiles. He buys the push mower.

If only he could know what he is doing. He inadvertently is ushering our economy one step closer to the brink of collapse. He will no longer need that gas can, or the gas in it. He will not need the small engine repair man to fix the small engine on his gas mower which he no longer uses. Since his new mower creates much less heat and friction, a screwdriver and maybe a file for sharpening the blades should take care of any maintenance. His heart and lungs, pushed by the slight increase in physical work, will most likely become stronger and his health will begin to improve. His doctor visits will become less frequent. His mental health and outlook will brighten. Encouraged by how great he feels, he’ll begin to spend more time being active, and healthy, and productive. His dependency on a host of things will begin to wane as his sustainable life starts to take hold and his consumptive and dependant life begins to fade. I wish we could warn him!

Now for the disclaimer – this was an exaggeration… or was it? We can’t really know. Perhaps as our test subject digs further into sustainability he will opt away from his push mower and any kind of lawn at all and go in the direction of xeriscape. Freed from the use of water and mower alike, he is that much less dependant on what he previously thought he needed.

“I like my lawn,” I hear you saying.

I like your lawn too. That’s why so much of this is speculation. I know you won’t give up your lawn. And your neighbor probably won’t give up his riding lawnmower. I think that’s fine. The ways that each of us personally respond to the onslaught of green isn’t really important. What is important is that public consciousness will be tuned toward the possibility of a more independent, sustainable life. This possibility holds great promise for a large portion of the public who is in debt from trying to compete in a society with roots so sunken into our particular brand of consumerism that many of us don’t know any another way. We’ve all heard it said, “You’ve got to pay to play.” But do we really have to pay so much? Now don’t get me wrong, we all have luxuries we won’t soon abandon, perhaps we’ll never feel compelled to, but at least we will see the option to decide for ourselves what is important, and what is necessary, and what is good, and what is not.

“I don’t need to pay for gas to have a sharp green lawn?” you ask.

No, you don’t.

I am, like I warned in the beginning, not an expert on any of this by any means. So I hope that my speculations will be tested and critiqued. Math, I’ll confess, has never been my strong suit. Economics, a close relative to math, does, unfortunately for me, play a key part in this conversation. Despite this, nonetheless, there is an underlying logic which is less elusive to the mathematically impaired among us. Without trying to overcomplicate anything (since it would probably just be hot air), what I am saying is that I cannot see, possibly because my sight is limited, the likelihood of our market continuing on a stable course if a greening of our society occurs on a large scale. As the current contractions of our economy continue, the hot breath of change makes a lot of us uneasy, and for good reason. We have much to lose. We are deeply invested in the system we currently know, our lives are deeply woven with our economy.

There are those who say it can work well – the marriage of consumerism and environmentalism. Efficiency and productivity certainly increase with greener business practices. I would not oppose this fact for a second. I think we have the potential for a very healthy economy based firmly in green policies and practices. I think I should repeat that. I believe we have potential. I don’t know that the system is in place at this point to easily merge into a sustainable economy. With so many of the anchors of our economy sunk deep into principles of planned obsolescence, extreme consumption, exploitation of resources and people, and greed, there will be conflict in the mixing of green and gold.

I hope that this speculation in no way discourages the movement toward a sustainable society. Sustainability and independence from any kind of subjugation, based in material dependency or otherwise, is fundamentally important to quality of life.

Like my inability to completely accept or recognize the real extent and existence of the green tones of olive supposedly in my skin, I also am not entirely sure that I can accept the implications of what I’ve just outlined. I know that there will be change. That’s something that, looking at a brief history of humanity, seems to remain as a constant. Forced by changes in the environment, facilitated by transformations in our potential to manipulate our own situations, change will invariably come. The extent and speed with which we meet this change, however, is something that we can only speculate about. The greening of our world system is something that I desperately hope for, although I may not truly be prepared to accept some of the complications and consequences of such a shift. That doesn’t matter though. Change will come.

Maybe it was the flu that made my skin look green. Maybe I, like the economy swallowing up the green movement, swallowed a bug. Maybe I hadn’t been active enough, or had enough sleep. Maybe I’m not green at all. I don’t know. I am sure that I would’ve felt a whole lot better, though, if I owned a push mower.