Hello! I'm Back and Greener!

Last November I took a job as a blogger of the science/clean tech/green/environmental sort. That’s why I fell off the face of blogspot. At times it feels like I have fallen off the face of the planet too.

The set of sites I browse on the Internet has changed in the last six months because of the blog (that really I am not qualified at all to write) that needs to be posted daily.

Before this freelance job I spent my time on TMZ and retail sites salivating over celebrities and shoes. Now I spend my days waiting for news of an oil spill off Brazil’s coast or Mitt Romney to give a speech that subtly digs at our President’s environmental policies. It’s engaging work and I try my best to be an engaging blogger but some days I feel in way over my head with the content. Hardly ever do I feel like an insightful writer. But my bosses are happy with my writing and they haven’t fired me after six months in their employ so there’s that at least.

The other difficult part about being an environmental blogger is the guilt I often feel about the way I live. Though I have always been a bit of a hippie and eco-conscious blogging about that stuff has pushed me to live a shade greener than I had been and has exacerbated my paranoid Type-A traits.

 A few weeks ago David took me to a local mall (I’m not that off the grid I still love stuff) and while there I bought him a soda in a glass bottle. After he finished he moved to throw it away and that’s when I screamed, passing in between him and the trashcan I practically threw myself on it like it was a grenade. I hissed: “You can’t throw that bottle in here! Are you crazy?! It has to be recycled! Do you know what they will do to me if they find out we didn’t recycle that bottle?”

Now there aren’t roaming bands of eco-bloggers checking up on their cyber colleagues to make sure we are using composting toilets, biking to our destinations, and shunning plastic. While we try to practice what we preach we are all still a bit hypocritical because we live in a world that makes certain demands of us: we drive cars, we use electricity etc.

But there are commenters on the Internet that will be more than happy to rake a green blogger over the coals for his or her actions. For example over at grist.org commenters are doing just that to Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan.

She decided to take a No New Stuff challenge in May to see if she could do without certain items, find them secondhand, or repair what she already owned.

Today she posted about her struggle to purchase or not to purchase a can of hair mousse. Like any good hypocrite who shops at Sephora and wears mascara I scoffed, “Mousse?! What the eff is this girl doing buying mousse?” Then she wrote she already had a bottle of hair product at home but she wanted to replace it because she didn’t like it. She wrote a disclaimer to defend herself because she knew the shit was going to hit the fan when we found out her need for mousse.
  

“While it would certainly be admirable for me to give up all styling-related energy and resource use, I still live in a world where professional standards dictate I have to look halfway decent on occasion. For me, that requires a gob of styling product and a steady hand with a blow dryer.”

Did she just admit to using a hair dryer? Good Lord, what sort of unruly, awful hair does this woman have? How decent does she have to look that “wash and go” isn’t good enough?

 Well, now I was irate. I have never used a hair dryer not even in the winter to prevent my hair from freezing nor in the summer to keep my hair from looking like a poodle’s. I checked to make sure I was at Grist because I couldn’t believe she was a regular hair product user, owned a hair dryer, and former editor of Backpacker magazine.

However, I wasn’t nearly as angry as other Grist readers. They wrote about how Kwak-Hefferan had “epically failed” in the store on the last day of her challenge, called her mousse conundrum a “First World Problem.” Essentially calling her privileged and wasteful. Others applauded her for trying and pointed to the angry as the reason green living isn’t more popular because we are all judgmental, holier-than-thou, elitists.

As of right now Kwak-Hefferan hasn’t defended herself against the little mob and she may never. Though I expressed my distaste about the mousse to a friend over chat I’m not upset enough to tell Kwak-Hefferan she failed. In fact, I stared at my hands with chipped tangerine nails, chastened because we all have habits some of which are easier to break than others. Being responsible about the environment, about anything really, requires that you lead by example and are respectful of others because being self-righteous will accomplish nothing in the long-run.