Green

(This week Julie wants to know what the earth or environmentalism means to us.)

I admit it: my environmentalism is not 100% altruistic. I can't say exactly what % it is altruistic, but at any rate it's not 100, and that's the important thing. Because the earth is a bit of a close personal friend of mine, and I would so like it if people would stop abusing her.

What I love about her that you (or I, at any rate) don't get from anyone else is her absolute commitment to egalitarianism.

When I ride my bike down to the park and sit on the river's banks, on large boulders that are sometimes in the sun and sometimes in the shade; when, if the weather is warm, I work myself right down to the water's edge to dip my fingers in; the river does not say to itself, "This one yelled at her kid this morning. Let's be extra cold." The sun doesn't pull itself behind a cloud because I don't dye my greys. The trees don't shrivel up and turn brown because my car is getting old and doesn't like starting in winter anymore.

Nothing about who I am matters when I'm sitting there. The river will dance over the stones the same for anyone who comes along behind me, whether supermodel or felon, geriatric or child, executive or homeless--they get the same rushing, the same backspray, the same wobble on the third boulder behind the bench. A rabbit or coyote or chipmunk or even a mushroom will see the same trees (if you ignore the mushroom's total lack of sense organs).

Similarly, when I was young and skinny and weird, and I laid on the ground of a pine needle forest, I did not get extra jabs from the fallen needles because I was such a dork.

If a wealthy man and I were to camp in the same patch of open ground, the planet would not leave a pebble right underneath my right hip while apologizing profusely for the inconvenience to the man and promising to rectify it right away; nor would it invent lumps and roots for a poor kid wearing thick glasses because his parents can't afford contacts.

A breeze won't look up my skirt and then follow me home, begging for my phone number.

It is possibly the only experience most of us have with such indifference: the rain doesn't care what your skin colour is or if your parents never graduated from highschool or that you're a boy who likes to wear skirts. Maples go scarlet for anyone, whether people who look like them regularly grace the covers of magazines or not. Brad Pitt and Scarlet Johannsen don't get a better snowstorm than the rest of us.

I know as well as you do that our race and class and sex and age and size and ability and all the rest of it absolutely affects the kind of access we get to the planet and the share of her resources we can claim before we are labelled thieves, radicals or terrorists and locked away. But that's a people thing. Once we get to the same spot on the same day, you and I both get the same sun and the same birdsong and the same crocuses sticking their green fingers through the mud. You never get that from people.

Maybe that's why it's so easy for me to relax in natural spaces.

And maybe that's why it's so easy for me to believe that when the planet gets sick of us and decides to fry the lot of us, being a millionaire is not going to save you. It might get you a reprieve, but in the end an inhospitable planet is inhospitable in Ethiopia and Kansas and Belarus and Bel-Air.

Most importantly for me, I think, is that one day when I'm old and possibly disabled and become invisible in that way that old women seem to, when the cashier's eyes slide automatically to the person standing behind me and people wait with an impatient grin on their face for me to hurry my ass through the door they're holding, and I'm taking my bag full of prescriptions home to sort them all into their slots in the day-of-the-week pillbox on my kitchen table, once I get outside and turn my face up to the sky, I get the same sun as the person beside me, no matter who they are.

Posted by Andrea at April 16, 2008 8:53 AM under The Green Family

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