Cheaper, Greener...More Chic 3 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

Growing up, thriftiness was next to godliness. My sisters and I were never in want, but our eternal case of low-grade covetousness was stoked by an odd egotism: we were too good to eat out, shop anywhere but secondhand, or upgrade from a muffler-less Aerostar to something that didn’t belch smoke. We were too good because only people who were poor—or those who would soon be so—wasted their money on material things.

This twisted attitude has led my sisters and me to wear sweat-stained button-ups to interviews, regularly consume moldy food, and hold a general phobia of spending more than fifteen dollars on any single purchase. In an age when twenty-somethings frequently declare bankruptcy, the four of us slink back to the fold to mourn anal-retentive hoarding and to dare each other to indulge in the occasional pack of full-price gum.

Imagine our surprise as, with the rise of the green movement, the hallmarks of our particular lunacy are touted as enlightened and earth-conscious. No longer is it gauche for us to arrive sweaty on bikes. No longer do our roommates chide us for soaping out and saving Ziploc bags. Suddenly, scavenging through each other’s (and other people’s) trash is in vogue, as is the once tacky impulse to borrow and lend.

But as Caroline Langston alluded in her recent Good Letters post, “The Pure, Local, Organic Thing Itself,” the current impulse to go green often seems to be one of accessorizing, name-dropping, and, well, being cool.

From Seventh Generation to Subarus to the “One Less Car” T-shirt that one of my fellow bike-commuters sports every day, the Green Religion is a sorority that even my cheapskate-self feels a bit desperate to pledge—if not for the aspirations of purity that Caroline mentions, then just for the more base reason that all the beautiful and well-heeled people are doing it.

But with its strange blend of pseudoscience, big spending, and earth/self worship, trendy greening often smacks of the legalism that so many of its spiritual, but not religious, adherents want to put away with the faiths of their childhoods. It’s ironic that both contemporary faith and contemporary environmentalism can breed a hypocrisy marked by conspicuous consumption, and by a membership sometimes most easily identified not by the witness of their lives, but by the T-shirts on their backs.

It brings to mind the odd egotism that my sisters and I still fight—the long, awkward work of turning an idol an ideal, and then a rightly ordered habit. Hopefully, as this wave of earnest and accidental environmentalists comes of age, we will have the courage to see the Creator behind the created, and fully turn our efforts from vanity to integrity.