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Author: Sarah Scherschligt
Color me hypocritically green.
When I was a child, my family used to visit my grandparent’s cabin in the lake country of Northern Minnesota. One day my Pop and I were exploring the lakeshore when we found a marsh. I was an adventurer and the world was full of surprises waiting to be discovered. The belching frogs, redwing blackbirds and even the leeches were endlessly fascinating.
The next year we went back to the cabin and I couldn’t wait to go to that marsh. But over the winter, the unspoiled lakeshore was bought by a developer. He was putting up more cabins and those cabins, of course, needed a road. You know what comes next. My beloved marsh had become a graded swath of rust-colored dirt. A big yellow machine was planted where the cattail once stood.
I was heartbroken and incensed. How did this happen? Nobody asked me if they could ruin it. I became an environmentalist that day I discovered my beloved marsh was ruined.
Now as an adult, I see the complexities of such a situation a bit more clearly. To get to my grandparent’s cabin, we drove on roads. Of course, those roads all were former fields or forests or marshes.
But I still have a bit of that childish simplicity. I now live in a new suburban complex in a part of Maryland that used to be considered the country. I bemoaned the loss of farms and open land in the area to a friend: “There are so many developments. How many townhouses do we need?” Her retort: “Sarah, and where do you live?” That’s right. In a townhouse sited on land that was a fallow farm just 5 years ago. Color me a hypocrite.
In early March, Wendell Berry, environmental champion, spoke at a gathering about climate change. He was at the end of a program filled with beautiful, but patently one-sided praises of environmentalism. I love that stuff and even I was starting to tune out. It was a breath of fresh air when Berry began by saying:
“The evening has produced, among other things in me, an all too familiar realization. Namely that I flew up here to tell you among other things that if I was going to get here guilt free, I would have had to walk. This is a paradox we’re all caught in and it ought to give us an appropriate sense of complexity. Seems to me I’ve been for 35 or 40 years flying around the world telling people in effect they ought to stay at home. That’s a hard nut to crack.”
Yes, it is a hard nut to crack. My name certainly appears on the “guilty” list. I’ve logged my share of frequent flyer miles. I drive a pick-up. It’s fuel efficient for its type, but its no hybrid and it’s certainly no bike. I like long showers. I haven’t written a political letter about the environment for years. I sometimes turn up the heat in my house to be cozy. It was just 2 weeks ago – that’s a full year after my church did an awareness campaign about CFLs – that I switched out the bulk of my light bulbs.
And embarrassingly, I only switched out the light bulbs because my church was about to be featured in the Washington Post for its creation care work and I was ashamed that my own house wasn’t in order. It felt more like cleaning up the house when you know your parents are coming to visit than a genuine act of caring.
Hypocrisy smacks us all in the face at some point. So what are we to do? As far as I can tell, when you’re doing all you can and you still can’t stand your own hypocrisy, here are the options:
1) Give up.
2) Be hyper-vigilant.
3) Push it to your community.
1) Giving up has little sway for me. I’m not cynical and can’t just throw up my hands as if my actions don’t matter. They might be very small, mattering only in the end to me, but I care too much to give up.
2) Being hyper-vigilant is attractive, but it doesn’t work for me either. I’m as careful as I can, but vigilance can easily become isolating and I’ve seen it turn a concern into an off-balanced, ineffectual, personal crusade. I don’t want to be that person that people run away from if they happen to have a Styrofoam cup in their hands.
3) Push it to your community. This option recognizes your hypocrisy but also recognizes that you’re caught in the middle of a powerful system that’s bigger than you. It will take the power, creativity and commitment of a caring community to change the system and as important, to change YOU.
I go with #3. The little girl who loved a marsh needs some serious help to turn her dreams of paradise into reality. I can’t do it alone – and it’s not only because I don’t have the energy or smarts. It’s because I am fundamentally a hypocrite. It’s my hypocrisy that makes me need people around me helping me out, giving me ideas, celebrating when I cut out my car or gently (gently) chastising me if I leave my space heater running. Some people might say that I’ve helped my congregation become greener, and that’s probably true. But the flip side is that they’re making me greener too, long showers and all.
