Verdancy

Last night I was reading the NY Times online about the election in Massachusetts, and I got so depressed and angry about the Democrat losing Ted Kennedy's seat (and thus all Democrats in the country losing, and thus the country as a whole losing) that I flipped over to the "lite" news. And I read an article about how going green is breaking up relationships. Apparently it is very common for one partner to be more "green" than the other and this causes rifts. I can attest to this in my own life.

Although I think of myself as a fairly verdant sort of person, Rocket Boy is greener, by a long shot. Back in Boulder there was a woman in our neighborhood, Lisa Morzel, actually a City Council member, who didn't even have trash service, because she basically never threw anything away. She recycled, reused, composted, or just didn't engage with in the first place, everything. (OK I just looked at her website and it says "Generates less than 5 bags of garbage per year." Honestly.) RB aspires to be just like her. He saves large numbers of plastic bags and containers (this might be considered hoarding), he puts things in the recycling that are not on the "acceptable" list because he thinks they should be on the list, and he eats moldy bread and rotting leftovers to avoid throwing them away.

I try. I really try to be green and I really want to be green. But there are some things I just don't want to deal with. Laundry detergent bottles for instance. It takes so much water to get them clean! How is that a good thing, in this land of no water? Instead I save them up, and when RB is out of town on garbage day, I throw them all in the bin.

The article said that differences in green-ness are a problem because the more green person tends to act a bit sanctimonious about it and the less green person gets mad because, gosh darn it, I'm still a lot greener than the folks next door (or, as in our case, everyone else in Ridgecrest).

I just went back on the NY Times website to find the article again and I can't find it. But instead I found an article about, wait for it, a new kind of desert spider! "The spider, Cerbalus aravensis, was collected in the Sands of Samar, a dune area on the Jordanian border. C. aravensis is large by spider standards — up to five inches across....The scientists have yet to learn much about the spider’s habits, though presumably it consumes insects and, given its size, perhaps small geckos. But Dr. Shanas said time might be running out as its habitat was endangered."

My reaction to hearing that this spider is endangered was not as green as it might have been...