Grr. Arrgh.
As it turns out, writing regularly
about something you care deeply about is a problem. I do not say this as a
“normal” person. I say this as a writer and a teacher of writing.
Writing is hard at the best of times.
And right now when, quite literally, the water is rising in many low-lying parts of
the world including our own major cities, is not the best of times. So, in the
interest of offering my take both on environmental issues (on which I am surely
not an expert) and on writing (on which I really am), I offer you here a frame
tale, a story told about a story (kind of like Wuthering Heights, but with less
over-the-top emotion and I hope more pragmatic usefulness). You can judge the
ins and outs for yourself and, hopefully, draw your own (Earth-conscious)
conclusion.
Two weeks ago I was in Philadelphia on
a sustainability retreat organized by GreenFaith, an interfaith environmental
education organization. Along with about 35 other people—including roughly 30
Christians, 3 Hindus, a Buddhist, a Jew, and a Muslim—we stayed at a Quaker
retreat center called Pendle Hill and visited several sites where people are
doing a variety of sustainability initiatives.
We saw the geothermal energy system and
green roof at the national center for the American Friends Service Committee
(Quakers). We visited the Energy Coordinating Agency, a green-jobs training
center where young people learned how to weatherize and retrofit existing
buildings to make them energy-efficient. And we conducted environmental audits
of a church and a synagogue.
Interfaith initiatives are always fun,
because you learn so much about other faiths, and they also require a little
patience for the same reason, because somebody always has to explain why X Group
does Y Crazy Thing, and sometimes the explanations can take a while. As you might
imagine, when 35 people from 5 different faiths walk into a bar, it can take a
long time to get to the punchline.
The half of the group that I was a part
of was assigned to the synagogue, and my subgroup covered the Water part of the
audit for that space. We looked at sinks, water fountains, toilets, urinals,
refrigerators, coffee machines, potted plants, and the general risk of pipe
leaks. Now, I have never spent any time in a synagogue and absolutely not while
only paying attention to the water.
My group discovered that the synagogue
was doing a good job avoiding bottled water at its events, but that all the
toilets were standard flush. The easiest way for them to decrease the amount of
water they used would be to change to low-flush toilets—the kind that make a
distinction between “Number 1” and “Number 2” and allow you to choose the size
of your flush accordingly. (I am not kidding. We have these at MIT and that is
exactly the language they use.)
The other groups found ways for the
synagogue to decrease the overall energy use and made recommendations for the
avoidance and (when unavoidable) safe storage of toxic cleaning chemicals. And
because they already kept a fairly complicated kitchen due to the need to
separate kosher and non-kosher food, they had already done a lot of thinking
around food issues.
The folks at the synagogue were as
grateful for our help as we were to them for allowing us to get experience
auditing with their community’s building. The exercise made the systems nature
of environmental problems so much clearer, and also showed how different
systems—like food and water, or water and energy—interact and/or overlap. Such
dynamism means that thinking environmentally requires thinking flexibly, in a
way that more traditional A-to-B-to-C linear thinking does not.
And that alone is interesting to me as
a writer, since language is unavoidably linear: article to noun to verb to
preposition to object… To accurately write down a complex environmental idea,
one would practically have to borrow a baby’s mobile and put the words on the
ends of the strings to show the dynamic relationships.
And then, if, for example, one had
started writing a blog with a convenient image or phrase (ethnicity, jokes),
which one thought at the time could be used to hook the reader at the start and
gain closure at the end (environmental problems are no joke; insert interfaith
humor here), and which later one realized wasn’t going to fly—
And if, just for example, one were
Trying Very Hard to post to one’s environmental blog More Often than, say,
every year or so—
Then one would, I suspect, have to be
honest rather than perfectionistic, and simply post the damn thing without the
pretty closure one had been, for example, hoping for.
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