Green Guilt and Eco Indulgences

Catholic people are famous for the guilt they suffer. According to Wikipedia, Catholic guilt is defined as

the feeling of remorse, self-doubt, or personal responsibility that results when a Catholic or Lapsed Catholic engages in sinful acts.

guilt1.jpgThere’s an identical syndrome for all of us who try daily to live green sustainable lives: Green Guilt. Green guilt is the feeling of remorse, self-doubt, and personal responsibility that results when a human living in a suburb contemplates their participation in global warming. Sometimes panic ensures, as in, “Oh god. We have GOT to dump the SUV. And I didn’t notice the grapes I bought were grown in CHILE! Why didn’t I buy them at the farmer’s market?!?! Oh god. I’m such a failure! I can just FEEL my carbon footprint GROWING!”

And since all forms of guilt translate into a market, we have eco-indulgences for sale: carbon offsets. Do these indulgences really ovrvw_lg_escalade1.jpgguarantee us a place in green heaven? I’m not so sure. We can continue to pursue our same lifestyle so long as we pay to help build wind power installations? Hmmm. I don’t know. I’m skeptical. Al Gore, the Savonarola of our day, lives in a mansion that purportedly consumes as much as twice the amount of electricity and gas in one month as an average American household consumes in a year. If Al Gore bought carbon offsets, would we forgive him for being such an egregious hypocrite?

In our everyday lives we have to reconcile driving the SUV packed full of kids, or groceries, or sometimes nothing but the driver, against our feeling that we don’t want to make things worse. We want to give our children and grandchildren a clean beautiful planet. We don’t want to buy any more plastic. (But even Trader Joes wraps the veggies in plastic!) Sometimes it feels impossible to gain any ground. It’s always summed up as a “lifestyle” choice, but this doesn’t begin to address the deep changes we’ll need to make to improve our relationship to nature. In the meantime, we’ll live with the many ironies of trying to be green, of not quite making it, and feeling those guilty pangs.

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June 1, 2008 | Filed Under New You, Perfect World 

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