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hunter

(38,264 posts)
5. They talk about their green cars at the Sierra Club...
Tue Jul 23, 2013, 02:22 PM
Jul 2013

... and their eco-vacations to Costa Rica.

But nobody wants to sit next to the guy who rides his old bicycle to the meeting, buys his clothes at the thrift store, and doesn't dress up in freshly washed outerwear every day. My most infamous conflict was with my wife... she took my old winter jacket to get cleaned. It's not like it smelled like rotten fish or feces -- it simply smelled like a winter jacket that had never been washed. The benign bacteria living in it were doing a good job eating hostile invaders. It's my opinion they should have been left alone.

I don't wash my cars either, except for the windows. My cars have lichen growing on them. Sorry kids, drive mine or buy your own. I hate my cars and they hate me. That's why they last so long. They've got mileage to the moon and now they are coming back. It's a balance of nature thing.

Yes, I am a dirty hippie.

I was a member of the Sierra Club for a long time, since I was fourteen years old, but it got to be ridiculous. I couldn't relate to the people at the meetings, and they couldn't relate to me. My idea of conservation was riding my bike to a "wilderness adventure" in the local mountains, eating rice and beans, living in a shack, hanging out in the computer lab all night.

Meanwhile they were talking about the MacIntosh computer they just bought, or the expensive cameras and backpacking equipment they were testing out in the Yosemite back country. One of the greater consumerist splurges of my life was an Olympus XA-2. I still have it. Cost me a day and a half moving furniture. I haven't bought a fancy camera since, except in thrift stores. My 35mm SLR with the very nice lenses cost $16. My digital cameras are crap but I'm quite fond of them. Pictures for free!

I was as guilty as anyone burning gasoline whenever my clunker small Toyota worked. After all, I could fill the gas tank for less than an hour's work and drive to Yosemite or Baja California for the weekend. But mostly I was happy to be where I was, wearing the same blue jeans and flannel shirt for five days in a row (changing only socks and underwear), mostly walking where I wanted to go, and feeling happy whenever I scored a few hot sauce packets abandoned at Taco Bell, or whenever I traded something for government surplus powdered milk which I'd turn into rich delicious buttermilk.

Personally, I don't think sustainability requires great "sacrifice." Most of the things modern society sees as "necessities" are actually great burdens. Private automobiles are one of those burdens. Airlines are another.

Adequate food, shelter, universal literacy, birth control, and medical care are not unobtainable goals -- the current world economy is much, much larger than that.

But the more powerful among us piss it all away and that unwitting elite group of feudal lords includes many Sierra Club liberals.

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