"I live on that high horse"

So, after I wrote my article on e-waste, I was helping one of my co-workers with a problem on her machine. Our computers here are pretty old, and I spend a great deal of my time trying to keep them all going. She and I were lamenting that computers today are just not designed to last. It's a functional attempt (conscious or not) to create a spend-and-toss culture. (More on that later.)

"Not to get on my high horse," she began, to which I immediately returned, "I live on that high horse."

And really, is that the problem? What I mean to say is that there are an awful lot of us "green types" out here saying things that, really, the people reading us have already heard. And already agree with--or they've already stopped reading our writing because they don't agree with us. So, am I just sitting up here on my high horse and not getting down on the ground and working through the mud? Is that useful?--to have a person standing up there and saying "this is what everyone should do"?

Colin Beavan decided to see what one man could do if he got off his high horse and put his money where his mouth was. He became No Impact Man. Two women started thinking about what it would take to meet Monbiot's requirement of 94% resource use reduction and tried to see if they could do it. They started a movement called Riot for Austerity.

I've mentioned them before. I've also mentioned that I'm very much not them.

Am I, however, a person who has the strength of my conviction to get off my high horse and do something? Increasingly, yes. And also really, really no. I don't throw away things I could recycle, mostly, and yet I am known by name and drink at the local Starbuck's. I use reusable containers to take food to work, even going so far as to bring cutlery, but I go out to eat more often than I should and while I cringe at the plastic wrap and plastic bag and styrofoam, I still eat the food. I send off e-letters to my government officials about various things, but you'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to go to a school board meeting and open my mouth.

I wish my high horse was a little shorter. I wish I had the courage of conviction to walk all the way to work (it's only three miles, which, really, not as far as all us modern people seem to think it is) or to eat only local food or to never buy something new if I can find it used.

I know, however, that I am not that super. I'm not No Impact Man. I am, however, a lot more like the rest of the world than I am different.

Colin had a post recently about prioritizing resource use to improve lives and it's not so much the article itself that interests me, as the comments. If you read through them all (and there are quite a few), you notice a conversation that goes on about the fact that we (the greenies) are not going to convince "other people--normal people" to give up their TVs and DVDs and iPods and Starbuck's and whatnot. In fact, we're just preaching to the choir and using only the choir to obtain data on what people really need to be happy.

It's a fair point. I have friends who live for their special television shows--hell, there are shows I absolutely will not miss myself; shows I must immediately jump on the internet to discuss the second the credits roll. I am not the only person I know who needs--needs--Starbuck's in the morning. Starbuck's. No substitutions.

The point of trying to change the world is that you need to change it in such a way that most of the people more or less don't hate it. For instance, television. It's never going away--at least not until we find an even cooler way of telling those stories. So instead of saying "oh my God, TV is wrong--it's a horrible resource-wasting beast!" (unless of course, you think that), maybe saying "okay, so, we have TV. Maybe we could find a better way of powering it? One that didn't send miles and miles coal trains to the power plant to make tons and tons of CO2."

I was going to follow that example with "Or fast food giants..." but I actually think fast food giants are slowly killing a great swath of the population and a good bit of the planet right along with them, so I don't really have much of an argument. Also, given that I'm one of the people being slowly killed (though much more slowly than I used to be), perhaps I'm not the best one to address that problem.

So instead I'm going to ask a similar question to Colin's: If there is something resource-using that you can't live without, how could it be made just a little bit less resource-using?

I'll go first. I really, really, really love watching television. However, perhaps I could put the television on its own separate plug so that I could keep the DVD and VCR and such unplugged and non-resource-using the vast majority of the time. And of course, I could unplug the TV before I go to bed at night and before I leave for work in the morning.

And maybe I could write that four hundredth letter to my local electric company to see if they can finally offer me a little bit of clean energy?