My Environmentalism

I’ve been figuring out and reflecting on how to cut my carbon footprint lately, especially because I’m reading a lot of reports about how we don’t have much time left to reverse the effects of human activity on climate change. Environmentalism was a huge cause for me as a kid, and in middle school I remember starting my own small campaigns to raise awareness about environmentalism and climate change. I think that is why Greta Thunberg was so encouraging to me when I first heard of what she was doing, because her life journey reminded me a lot of myself. I remember being really depressed during seventh grade and I also struggled with low self-esteem, and I wanted to feel a sense of purpose in life. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to care so much about the environment and global warming, but I remember around the time I was in fifth grade or sixth grade, my family and I watched a lot of documentaries. One of them was Super Size Me, and after watching the movie I decided I wasn’t going to eat McDonald’s ever again (of course, many of my peers took the film with a grain of salt, one of them telling me, “I saw Super Size Me nine times and I still love McDonald’s.) In fact, when I went over to a friend’s birthday party, her dad drove us up to McDonald’s in the morning after our sleepover and when they asked me what I wanted, I said, “Oh, no thank you. I watched Super Size Me so I’m not eating McDonald’s anymore.” I’m pretty sure I got an orange juice and one of the wrapped hash browns because I didn’t want to seem rude, but that documentary impacted me a lot (“The Smoking Fry” feature turned me off from ever having McDonald’s fries again)

Another documentary that scared the shit out of me and got me to care about the environment was An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary by former U.S. vice president Al Gore. The documentary explored how human activities over several years has contributed to rising temperatures, rising sea levels, and a rising urgency to save the planet. A year later I found myself watching this incredible livestreamed benefit concert called Live Earth, which took place in several cities around the world and was geared towards raising awareness about climate change and environmentalism. The festival featured a bunch of short films that were pretty brilliant. One took place in a convenience store and an old woman and a cashier argue about whether or not to ask for a plastic bag or bring a reusable one to the store. Every time each of them picks the plastic bag option, they slap each other and then break the fourth wall, telling the audience that it wouldn’t be necessary to ask for a plastic bag since plastic bags have a negative environmental impact and end up in the ocean. The old lady ends up bringing her own reusable bag to bag her groceries. Another short film was called “Inconvenient Ruth” and it was an animated short about a girl named Ruth and her penguin friend, Eff, who is a refugee of Antarctica and plays the banjo. Ruth talks about creative ways we can save the planet, like making buildings out of recycled orange rinds and drying used toilet paper out on clotheslines so we can reuse it (realistically, both of these would need to go through serious sanitary processes for us to actually do something like this. Even though I feel guilty about using a lot of toilet paper, I probably wouldn’t reuse it after all the stuff I put it through while using the restroom.) Ruth also has a huge crush on Al Gore, and she fantasizes about him being this hunky muscular guy and knight in shining armor, until a gas-guzzling car nearly runs her over and snaps her out of her romantic fantasies. She reprimands the person for producing carbon emissions by driving, and gets flustered, but then in a cruel twist of irony she ends up passing gas and her flatulence burns a hole in the ozone layer. As a child who loved tooting humor, I guffawed after watching this short film. It brought humor to a serious topic.

Another short film I loved was a three-part series called Bob and Harry: The Last Two Polar Bears. Bob and Harry were played by the late actor Rip Torn and Harry Shearer, and the show was about the last two polar bears who are still living even after the polar ice caps have melted and other species are going extinct due to the effects of global warming. Bob and Harry are trying to survive in a world where resources are becoming scarce, but they often fall short. In the first episode, they approach a real estate agent because they are looking for a home. The real estate agent shows them different climates where she thinks they will thrive, but the climates aren’t suited for polar bears. Because the polar ice caps have melted, all the climates are warm, and some are actually zoos where Bob and Harry wouldn’t be able to roam freely like they usually do. When Bob and Harry are about to give up, the real estate agent shows them the last glacier that she keeps in an ice box. However, it is really just a big ice cube, and it only has enough room for Bob and Harry to sit on it. It’s not a sustainable living environment for them because they actually need to be in an icy environment to thrive, but since the polar ice caps are gone, they don’t have a home to live in anymore. Another episode is where Harry tries to find a soulmate, and the lady who is finding a match for him can’t find the right match for Harry. The most she can find is a panda bear named Lucy who is attractive but has really bad digestive problems and lives far away from Antarctica. The matchmaking lady tells him that if he had come sooner, they would have found him a mate, and by sooner she means several years before global warming made several species extinct. The final episode in the series takes place at a restaurant, and Bob and Harry order seafood. However, instead of bringing out seafood or food that polar bears eat, the waiter brings them rice (without the sushi fish), a disgusting tar-like mixture of oil from an oil spill (when the waiter said it was a “Valdeez” broth, at first, I didn’t know what he was referring to, but then I realized it was a play on “Valdez” and was referring to the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in 1989.) and the final dish, a broth made of tangled fish nets and debris from the ocean. All of these episodes were meant to illustrate how depressing life is going to be for polar bears (and all life for that matter) if we don’t reverse the effects of global warming. I remember this series had a pretty serious impact on me, even though it, like Inconvenient Ruth, used humor to illustrate a serious point.

I remember also watching a few Ad Council commercials that were pretty scary when I watched them as a kid (as they were intended to be, because realizing how much the planet is burning up is pretty scary) One of them featured a series of kids saying the word “Tick” over and over again, and in between saying the word “tick” they listed off all the irreversible consequences of global warming, such as melting polar ice caps, severe drought, and devastating hurricanes. Another commercial by the Ad Council featured a middle-aged man standing in front of a camera while a train moved closer and closer, and he said that some people think the irreversible consequences of climate change are 30 years away (the ad came out around 2007) but in 30 years, it won’t affect him. He then moves to the side, and we see a girl on the railroad tracks with the train heading toward her as she looks hopelessly into the camera, indicating that the people who are going to suffer from global warming’s impact the most are future generations. The Ad Council was very effective in getting me to want to care about protecting the planet, and so I remember getting really pumped about finding creative ways to lessen my carbon footprint and raise awareness about environmentalism. I remember being in Texas History class and passing around an article from either Newsweek or TIME about an organic farming initiative that students at Yale University were kicking off (the article came out around 2006 or 2007) I’m sure my teacher wasn’t thrilled about me distracting the class while he was giving the daily lecture about how Texas wanted to secede from the Union, but some students actually enjoyed reading the article. I went on to buy organic cotton shirts with messages about saving the planet (one of the labels was called Mission Playground), to recycle like my life depended on it, and to turn off the lights whenever I left a room. Oh, and I also loved composting. Then in ninth grade, I read a book called 50 Ways to Save the Ocean, and it gave a lot of useful tips for what fish to eat and which fish to avoid, how to raise awareness about overfishing, and how to protect our world’s oceans. It had a lot of cute illustrations, which I found appealing because I loved a lot of books with cartoons, especially of animals. I ended up cutting out fish from my diet altogether, and decided to become vegan when I began ninth grade. I also started to look up fuel-efficient cars, and dreamed of one day owning a Mini Cooper, a Volkswagen Beetle or, better yet, a Toyota Prius. I think in college, I started to become more aware through doing research that the environmentalism movement wasn’t perfect and that it has a history of overlooking the contributions of people of color to the movement. I also didn’t know anything about environmental racism, which is where marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by pollution and other environmental problems. There is a predominantly Black community in Chicago called Altgeld Gardens, and they were located near a polluted water system. It was often called “the Toxic Donut” because so many chemical facilities surrounded the community, and a lot of residents in Altgeld Gardens started dying of health problems linked to exposure to these toxins. In 1979, Hazel Johnson, one of the residents, wanted to do something about this and so she started an initiative called People for Community Recovery, where she and the other Altgeld Gardens residents organized grassroots campaigns to address these environmental issues in their community and getting the state and the city of Chicago to recognize that this was a huge problem. Doing research on Altgeld Gardens really expanded my perspective on the environmental movement as a whole. While I was focused on the present-day environmental movement, I didn’t know much about the history of the environmental movement or how people of color played a huge role in the environmentalism movement and were often overlooked in history. I am grateful I got to take a course on environmental ethics in college, because that’s how I ended up learning about environmental racism and injustice and wanting to write a paper on it.