Week before last, entirely too many people took over a street corner in Harlem to have a DIY fish fry of epic proportions!

21CP is looking at a cultural moment or aesthetic that's running parallel to the environmental movement. This cultural moment doesn't mention environmentalism by name. You can't do the math on its carbon footprint. It's not about melting glaciers or polar bears or hockey sticks or Earth Hour.

It's about learning how to do things, keeping bees, engaging technology, reading Make Magazine, becoming compost fanatics, supporting urban farming and growing their own food and serving it to their friends in the context of dinner parties that are becoming increasingly baroque DIY events. This feels like a very fertile moment. There are threats that are clearly defined enough to start doing something, and these threats happen to be kind of vague, slow moving. Existentially perplexling.

So instead of focusing on the point of this world-sized, slow-as-a-glacier-melting-in-the-Andes knife point that's

headed

!

We are engaging with what actually put us here and what we can do about it. We are not yet doing the practical things we need to do on a policy level, like make carbon expensive. Hell, the biggest topic of conversation at the dinner parties I've been to is how to get all the waste composted! But you know, figuring out how to compost a regular dinner party leads to figuring out how to compost in a whole community, and that's how we change our waste infrastructure--by iteration. We are doing the cultural work necessary to get there. We are looking at our garbage, our land, our food, our time, our computers, our data. We are redefining abundance. Creating an economy that's not built on plastic crap. And we are doing this in ways that say Yes instead of No.

He's not arguing on a scientific or dogmatic level. He's not invoking sunspots or god's will or any of the other ignorance climate change deniers push forth. He's saying that the environmental movement's cultural focus on denying progress is wrong-headed. He's saying that enlisting kids in an eco-crusade reminds him a lot of growing up in Stalinist Hungary. He's saying that environmentalists miss the real problem with a culture of consumption when they talk about overconsumption as a moral failing.

Of course, the problem with Furedi's arguments is clear. He uses solid cultural arguments to deny an extracultural phenomenon, and, well... that's like using your years of experience doing the laundry to reject your house's plumbing problem. It's true that in some ways environmentalists are acting like fundamentalists and fascists. But unlike fundamentalism and fascism, our environmental woe doesn't go away once everyone stops believing in it and creating a culture around it.

This is a basic structural flaw, but that doesn't mean that his arguments are silly. In fact, these arguments have the potential to help environmentalism out a great deal! There seems to be enough consensus around the science of our ecological woe to justify changing the way we do things. The problem environmentalists have right now are ones of culture, or how we envision and implement these changes on a broad level. Popular environmentalism should be hooking critical, learned folks like Frank Furedi, not making him play rhetorical three card monte in an effort to prove to himself that the shit is not hitting the fan.

The shit is hitting the fan, and the question is: how do we enlist as many people as possible, particularly people who are smart and flexible enough to doubt? We need people like Furedi! Obviously strategies like leaving little notes at the bottom of emails asking him to consider the environment before printing; reminding him in hotel rooms that he should reuse his towels and getting kids to pester adults about why they are ruining the earth are just making him cranky. I agree! These are legitimately irritating aspects of popular environmentalism, and Furedi makes a reasoned, insightful case about why he has every right to be cranky.

But here's the thing. In his own arguments Furedi rails against the same fundamental problems with consumer culture that all environmentalists should embrace, and he does it better than we do. Consumerism isn't a moral failing, and even if it were that's a weak rhetorical strategy. Making environmentalism a matter of personal virtue relegates it to the world of choice, of lifestyle, and creates a lot of good reasons to reject it, and we don't have time for that kind of culture warring. Furedi's point about consumerism is much stronger: a consumer culture emphasizes things over ideas and conflates buying things with more meaningful acts like satisfying curiosity and self-expression. That's a statement that opens doors, allows people who will gladly cling to their lifestyle out of stubbornness, shame and pride a way to save face! It's a relatively value-neutral invitation to create more meaning.

Hell, his main beef doesn't even seem to be that climate change activists are wrong as much as the fact that he can't trust them because they are positioning themselves as activists and fundamentalists, and saying and doing things that lack integrity and common sense. And when he describes this behavior, he's often right.

There's a lesson in this. When I read Frank Furedi, I wonder whether it's even important to generate belief in climate change per se in order to move the ball forward. I think a lot of people who hate environmentalism would smile if presented with a cultural movement in which personal inventories of experiences and lessons are cultivated, rather than inventories of things, or in which efficiency is a primary aesthetic goal. A lot of people seem to want education and honesty to have a lot of economic value, and I see few people who oppose to cultivating a sense of curiosity about the world we live in, and that curiosity should include where your food and energy comes from. Certainly people who think like Furedi believe in the agency and will to progress that allows that curiosity to turn into better food, better sources of power.

These are simple cultural ideas about abundance, engagement, progress and agency that make the world work better, and that aren't that loaded, guilt-inducing or hard to swallow. There's no need to push everyone's Frank Furedi Button by getting all smug, or developing education programs for kids that are about outsourcing our nagging and shaming. I'm not even sure it's such a good idea to bring up climate change.

I mean, have you ever had a protracted conflict with someone that only got better when you stopped trying to tell that person what to do and let them figure it out themselves? Haven't you ever gotten so wrapped up in defending an idea that you just twisted it into something that's hard to defend once you've taken a step backward and looked at what you were doing?

Have you ever had a problem so big that the only way to engage it is to kind of stop looking at it?

It's entirely possible that the first step to getting folks on board is giving up on what seems to be the first goal of environmentalism: making people believe it.

I started 21CP because I was and remain convinced that an environmentalism of No is always going to have limited impact, and because I wanted to know what an environmentalism of Yes looks like. I think this is important because the scale of our environmental situation demands that everyone get on board. We need big changes, we can't make anyone do anything to change what they are doing, and our environmental issues are chronic, creeping ones. Why buy into that willingly? It's so much easier to make fun of environmentalists and keep doing what you've been doing and use your mind to justify your behavior than it is to change. You wind up in a world where totalitarian governments like China, who don't need buy-in from a polus, are making all the headway, Europe is earning a strong C and Americans are the assholes bringing up the rear.

The achilles heel of democracy is the fact that sometimes we need to take this extra step of creating a collective moral courage to get the votes to do the right thing, and that's a cultural process. We won't be making carbon expensive in America until we create a culture of environmentalism that is easy to buy into.

Popular environmentalism isn't cutting it because it's mostly organized around:

Looking At The Horror (Disaster Porn)
Self-Denial
Calculating Stuff
The Death of Capitalism/Apocalyptic Visions of the Future

And the bottom line is that all of this stuff sucks. I organize my entire life around environmentalism and I can't get behind this stuff. I can't look at the pictures of the oily birds, all they do is paralyze me with guilt. I actually have a somewhat similar lifestyle to Colin Beavan, and every time I read or watch him I want to slap the proscriptive smugness right out of him. Small-bore ecoguilt deliberations about nothing make my head hurt. I feel like every time I talk about the environment at a party, the first thing everyone sets on the table is some Cormac McCarthy vision of our not-too-distant future. Or an expression of sick, misplaced mirth about how much our economy sucks. Or some other nugget of hysterical, unhelpful nonsense that would get you slapped across the face if the emergency felt more acute. More real.

I firmly believe that if we do nothing we will absolutely deliver a Mad-Max future of resource warring, mass-migrations, upheaval and death to our children, and that the endgame is human extinction. I also believe that this dire future only makes it more important to get a fucking grip and see that we are offering up the worst sales pitch for changing course ever! Be an environmentalist: torture yourself with horrible images of faraway things you can't control! Make every choice an incredibly complicated one! Sit in the dark! Have a hot and righteous summer, and a chilly, smug winter! Be an End Times-er without having to buy into religion!

When you're in an actual emergency, and we are, the last thing you should do is keep your mind focused on how huge the problem is, how powerless you are, or how high the stakes are. People who survive actual emergencies, and this is one, remain positive and connected, find beauty and awe in the moment of survival and are incredibly oblique in their approach. They're not bugging about the fact of the plane crash. They're thinking about the sensation of crawling over this one chair, and about how far away the exit is, and noticing how particularly beautiful the stars look in the sky as they flee.

Because this is an actual emergency, the sales pitch of popular environmentalism should focus exclusively on how totally fucking abundant composting makes you feel. You are getting away with something when you turn fifty percent of your garbage into a gardening commodity! Feedlots and E-coli are too dire! Better to skip the feedlot footage and create a culture of dinner parties and farmer's markets. Effective sales pitches craft an environmentalism of Yes. And I think they do that by replacing the hysteria with a specific redefinition of abundance.

Abundance is due for re-calibration anyway. Our old definition of abundance left us awash in plastic crap, gorged on MSG and sugar and salt and fat, so focused on more that we collectively spun out of control. Abundance 1.0 turned out to be donut shaped, with a big existential pit of emptiness in the middle, and everyone kinda knows it. Anyone who's buying Eat, Pray, Love crap on QVC is ready to be gently guided away from that insanity and toward a genuinely abundant life of actually eating, praying and loving, and an economy is already being built around that transition. This economy enables DIYers and hobbyists and curiosity, is experience-based not product-based, and is about closing instead of widening the existential donut hole. It doesn't mention environmentalism by name. But it's laying the foundation of Yes that enables smart environmental choices.

Image of Tom Mylan teaching a butchering class at Brooklyn Kitchen

Starting the 21CP discussion again after a conversation my husband and I had on a recent vacation. We agree that there are a lot of little movements that look disparate, but that could all be grouped together as an aesthetic or cultural response to the world we are living in.

DIY is huge, and I think it's not about the recession as much as it's about the sense of engagement, and the way DIY extends a purchasing event and turns it into an experience. People want to know where their food comes from, are taking butchering classes, getting into urban farming in a big way. There's debate about whether this saves food miles or is at all effective on this boring, number-crunching level. But I don't think food miles is the best argument for urban farming. I've been working on urban farming for awhile myself, and I think people are saying that they want their city to be so clean that they can put it in their mouth, and offering their mouths as a first step that's open and, at least in Brooklyn where I live, a little bit brave. I don't know very many people who are slavishly and literally organizing themselves around the culture of environmentalism that already exists. I don't see people calculating carbon footprints or denying themselves convenience or pleasure. The friend I have that could have the smallest footprint, the one who is compost-crazy, lives in the tiniest apartment, rides her bike everywhere... she also happens to engage in a lot of "flights to nowhere" in search of frequent flier miles. I know very few people who are down with the No Impact Man approach to environmentalism.

Despite the total urgency of our environmental situation, despite BP filling the Gulf of Mexico with oil, I see very little protest, self-denial or rejection of our culture's relentless focus on abundance. What I do see is this: every single person I know is doing something to redefine what abundance means for them. These responses are about the word yes instead of the word no, they have a lot more traction with a lot more people than taking the stairs even though elevators are pretty efficient or otherwise denying yourself ever will, and they are so much more fun, positive and beautiful than carbon footprint math.

I want to write about that for awhile.

Here's a guide for spotting what we have planted, complete with latin and common names. Stay tuned for next year's Meadow Plans, a weed identification page, so that you can help the wildflowers you see without pulling out wanted plants, and a general re-tooling of this blog, because that's the great thing about having a blog. You can just start, and let it figure out its own purpose. This blog's purpose has wavered and floundered, but is finding itself as we speak.

Centaurea cyanus, or Cornflower, or Bachelor's Buttons (annual)

Cheiranthus allionii, or Siberian Wallflower (biennial--leaves only this year, next year look for blooms!)

Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, or Ox-Eye Daisy (perennial, unopened buds are edible)

Chrysanthemum maximum, or Shasta Daisy (perennial)

Coreopsis lanceolata, or Lance-Leaf Coreopsis (perennial)

Coreopsis tinctoria, or Plains Coreopsis (annual)

Cosmos sulphureus, or Sulphur Cosmos (annual, won't bloom until late summer or fall)

Cosmos bipinnatus, or Wild Cosmos (annual, will keep flowering until frost)

Delphinium ajacis, or Wild Larkspur (annual)

Dianthus barbatus, or Sweet William (biennial or short-lived perennial, edible flowers)

Echinacea purpurea, or Purple Coneflower (hardy perennial)

Eschscholzia californica, or California Poppy (annual)

Gaillardia aristata, or Perennial Gaillardia or blanketflower (perennial, blooms through fall)

Gypsophila elegans, or Baby's Breath (annual or tender perennial)

Helianthus annuus, or Wild Annual Sunflower (annual)

Hesperis matronalis, or Dame's Rocket (short-lived perennial)

Lavatera trimestris, or Rose Mallow (annual)

Linum grandiflorum rubrum, or Scarlet Flax (annual)

Linum perenne lewisii, or Blue Flax (perennial, blooms in spring so look for it next year)

Lupinus perennis, or Perennial Lupine (perennial)

Nemophila menziesii, or Baby Blue Eyes (annual)

Papaver rhoeas, or Red Poppy (annual)

Ratibida columnaris, or Mexican Hat (hardy perennial)

Rudbeckia hirta gloriosa, or Gloriosa Daisy (tender perennial)

Rudbeckia hirta, or Black Eyed Susan (perennial)

Silene armeria, or None-so-Pretty (annual)

An explosion of none-so-pretty, baby's breath, coreopsis and poppies on Lewis and Jefferson, along with a cosmos plant that isn't blooming yet.

It's offically Wildflower Season in Bed Stuy! It didn't work everywhere, and I don't quite know why yet, but am guessing that many flowers got choked out by weeds, and many other flowers got pulled as weeds or mowed. Hardly surprising, much of the neighborhood is under excellent care.

That doesn't mean there is nothing to see. I have spotted Coreopsis, none-so-pretty, baby's breath, bachelor's buttons, dame's rocket and all kinds of poppies, and there are lots of cosmos, or maybe daisy plants out there that are getting enormous and have yet to bloom. I don't even know what I haven't seen yet! My own walks indicate very little in the Mansiony Southlands and Condo-ey Northlands, and more in the kind of blown out area where I live. The best two Wildflower Habitats I have seen so far is the housing project on Gates and Lewis and the huge vacant lot that you can see from the Myrtle stop on the JMZ. Whoever bombed that lot deserves a pat on the back--it is chockablock with dame's rocket and bachelor's buttons that are easily visible from the platform!

Get out your cameras, take a walk, and head over to the official Bed Stuy Meadow flickrpool! And stay tuned for an Offical Identification Guide.

Thanks again to all the sponsors, small-time donors and the volunteers who made it happen!

An Actual Meadow of cornflowers seen from the Myrtle Avenue stop on the JMZ:

A tree pit on Van Buren and Lewis:

A tree pit on Kozskiuzko and Stuyvesant that looks like it's on its way to being brilliant:

And more of these sweet yellow flowers on Stuyvesant, maybe around DeKalb?

I also saw a lone poppy and more of these cute white flowers in a vacant lot on Monroe around Nostrand or so last night, but it was too dark to take a good picture. And there's another field of coneflower madness on Nostrand around Gates.

It's happening, and I must say the sensation of coming across the flowers is delightful, like finding treasure! Congratulations and thanks again to the army of volunteers who spread seeds and gave money!

July is time for treasure hunts!

Seriously, things are getting interesting in Bed Stuy. While there are just about zero wildflowers, there is talk about starting a nonprofit whose goal is to ensure that there is no such thing as vacant land in Bed Stuy--that every single lot is either turned into a community garden or interim-farmed.

Right now this is mostly just talk, but I don't doubt the seriousness of the people I am working with and of course, I do believe in followthrough. We may fail, but something will happen. This blog is nowhere near dead. I'll be writing more about this Urban Farm Syndicate... whatever it becomes.

Jesse Jenkins is waxing graphically on the complexity of climate change, and using that complexity as a reason to decide that cap and trade is insufficient, and that the real solutions are in the development of new technologies. And I am not a policy expert myself, but I call bullshit, for cultural and practical physical reasons.

First, one of the best aspects of Waxman-Markey is the fact that it exists as an appropriately scaled step in the right direction. It's like a parent coming into the room. I believe that this alone is enormous cultural tonic that will stimulate the positive drive to solve for climate change that most people want, but that we have no culture or language or shared psychological space to support.

The worst aspect of the climate change debate is the way it consistently brings out the worst in people. This creates a culture that every sane and moderate person is right to want to turn away from. The deniers are holding on to their wrong point of view way past the point of being reasonable and are generally letting themselves become tools of a strategy to delay action as long as possible because they are frightened. And environmentalists are running around on the comments section of blogs like Climate Progress talking in terms of hostile takeover, namecalling, and, just to put a nice fascist cherry on top, climate enlightenment.

Seriously. People are using the term climate enlightenment. And climate trauma.

Everyone is operating from a place of weakness, and this creates a culture around solving this problem that's heavy on fanciful flights of denial, imaginative totalitarian solutions, shrill voices, and comment moderation. It is entirely possible that Waxman-Markey would do little to untangle the complex flow chart above, but would do much to moderate and enrich the culture of climate change debate, simply because it would affirm in a broad way that the problem exists, and is under the purview of a responsible and responsive democratic government. Even if it doesn't do much, it could do a lot simply by providing a strong empathic, democratic trellis on which to train a grownup approach to solving the problem.

That said, I have sat patiently through many a presentation in which it was argued that we actually have the technology to fix climate change now, and that thinking about this in terms of some sort of technological superbreakthrough is both unnecessary and overly, dangerously hopeful. Or to put it another way, it's a big and complicated problem, but it's not that complex. There's too much CO2, methane and a handful of other greenhouse gasses. Let's cut the amount that we emit, starting now! We are enormously dependent on fossil fuels right now, but that doesn't mean that we don't any use clean energy and that we can't step up clean energy solutions, electric cars, government subsidized weatherstripping, Oprah-style boiler giveaways and other solutions right now. Today.

Or think of it this way. You have solved problems of your own in your own smaller-scale life, and you know as well as I do that the only way to start solving that enormous-looking problem is to take the first small step toward fixing it, even if that first step isn't enough, or isn't the exact right step. You can't lose fifty pounds without going for that first walk around the block, or making that first decision to eat one cookie instead of a bunch. You can't make anything without starting, and it's often hard to know where to start. And the practical power of Waxman-Markey is that is it gives a whole lot of people who want to start thinking about taking practical steps structured permission to start.

Climate change is a devil of a problem because it's large and potentially catastrophic, but at the same time persistently invisible and future-oriented. This makes it a collective problem of mind as much as a collective practical problem. There is a wide gap between how we (and I mean different camps, all claiming the status of We) imagine climate change and its solutions and what will actually occur. And the only way to manage that gap between what we imagine and what exists is to allow solutions to evolve incrementally and respond to what each solution yields. Waxman-Markey is the first serious large-scale actual poking of the problem that the United States has attempted. Rather than whinge about it before it even happens, I think that the best response is to entertain it, and see what it gives us, and respond strongly to what happens outside our jumbled collective mindscape.

Or to put it another way, we are all standing around imagining all kinds of scenarios, and judging Waxman-Markey against what we think will happen, even though the problem is external to us. This approach is very human, but it's less helpful than just admitting that we don't know exactly how to fix this problem or how any individual solution will unfold, and to try something that seems sane anyway, and asking the external problem to guide us.

I feel that I have more than said my peace about why I think Waxman-Markey is worth supporting in the comments of the two great Climate Progress posts about the subject, as well as probably-too-excited-for-publication email to the already-excitable Andrew Sullivan. Kevin Drum is already going Steven Segal on cap-and-trade doubters. There is no reason to keep shouting what he said! This is not going to be a post about whether you should support Waxman-Markey.

I want to take a step backward and talk about why it's important to jump in the policy fray at all, and what it means that most of the discourse is between environmentalists. This blog is about creating a positive and effective culture of environmentalism--in remaking our relationship to our earth in a way that's honest and undogmatic. Public. Guilt-free. Giving a shit about policy debate takes a little effort, but it's a big part of that honest relationship with the earth that we all seem to want. Policy is important for a reason so basic that I risk looking like a simpleton attempting to unpack it.

Policy is important because it's big enough. Policy is genuinely scaled to the crisis at hand. What you personally do about Waxman-Markey is way more important than your Sigg bottle or your lightbulbs or how many times a week you use your car.

This is elementary, right? Of course it's much more important to put a price on carbon in general than it is to worry about how much carbon you, puny human, emit. Duh! And yet it's important to linger here. It's important to use the current debate about Waxman-Markey, whether you support it or some other imagined legislation, as a lever that pries us off of one of the most destructive tropes of the environmental movement as it currently exists: the wrongly-scaled push for you to take personal responsibility for your small-scale consumer choices.

It's critical to stop framing environmentalism in terms of your personal consumer decisions.

That's hard to write. I am a light-shutter-offer myself. I don't countenance waste and have spent a lot of money this year on heat-exchanging whatzits, insulation and other efficiency-builders for my home. I loves me a low utility bill, and I would never deny anyone else that frugal pleasure. That's not what I am talking about.

I'm talking about that person you know who's going or went "Green" and has been a total pain in the ass ever since. It's hard to blame that individual Greenmonger. I have been that person, and you might have been too, and even if you've never personally taken someone else's kitchen scraps home to compost them, you probably love and empathize with someone who has. This behavior used to make sense. In a world where George W. Bush was president and didn't believe that anthropogenic global warming existed or that pollution was bad or that bodies like the EPA did legitimate work, personal consumer choices and small-scale eco-rituals were all anybody who was freaked out about our environmental woes had, and doing something always feels better than doing nothing. The problem with this particular course of action, of course, is that to the uninitiated it read poorly. The harder the individual Greenmonger (myself included) worked at trying to minimize her own personal impact, the more egotistically out of touch she seemed to the people around her. The result was a vicious cycle of very little progress: scores of people who really did want to care were put off by the one co-worker who kept digging in the trash and nagging people about Vampire Power. Environmentalists became the ultimate Debbie Downers--the ones who couldn't stop reminding you that this or that product that you use every day is toxic, talking about the horrors of factory farming when you're trying to eat, or the worst--expounding ad nauseum on the benefits of not buying anything unless the canvas bag was at the ready and otherwise living difficultly. Dick Cheney's evil prophecy was more than fulfilled. Environmentalism didn't just become a matter of personal virtue. Environmentalists became Victorian scolds with a wrongly-scaled sense of their own impact on the world and an impaired sense of humor.

Most people who are bothering to read this blog have probably struggled with their own inner environmentalist. It's impossible to live without anxiety and proselytizing in a world where it's common knowledge that most building materials and carpets and such are for outdoor use only, and yet are being put in buildings where you can't even open the window. I am not interested in mocking environmentalists because they are easy to mock. This mockery is a means to a specific end. I want to understand the cultural milleu of Waxman-Markey, a bill that gets a strong B+ from Climate Progress, and that seems to be getting its strongest pushback not from climate change deniers but from Climatologists and myriad other people who think it's not good enough, or total enough. People who are probably otherwise understand that representative government is better than fascism, but who are writing on Climate Progress right now that the only reasonable course of action is immediate government seizure and shutdown of all coal-fired power plants, no matter the cost. No matter the economic repercussion.

That's a tyrannical thing to think and say. I think it's honestly dangerous to think of climate change as a problem that's above the rule of law, as if the CO2 in the atmosphere was more real than or otherwise trumps government. And the only way that I can begin to understand that totalitarian drive is to admit how totalitarian I can be with myself, and to understand environmentalism as a movement that has for too long been too individual.

When environmentalism is a matter of personal virtue, then it all boils down to a relationship between your personal resolve and this unending series of disgusting threats. And when you've organized yourself as an environmentalist in this way, it's not just hard to think in terms of compromise, it's weak. Compromising with yourself is nothing more than pussing out--it's what you do when you allow yourself to eat the second bowl of ice cream, or sleep too late. Uncompromising, overcoming relationships between the self and an external reality are the stuff of athletes and heroes. Being totalitarian with yourself is a virtue--you are not a democracy. I think that this is why it's such a slippery slope to go from buying the toothpaste that isn't full of sweetener to showering with a bucket so that you can flush your toilet or water plants with your gray water, even though you live someplace that's actually got plenty of water.

This is all fun and games when it's between the ears. But it's no way to work with a group or otherwise think large scale, and our environmental woes, from pollution and climate change to stripmining and the Pacific garbage gyre, are global in scale. I don't want to discard environmentalism's reliance on personal virtue because I don't identify with it, but because I do, and because I know that very little of the material in my own Environmentalist's Internal Dialogue is suitable for public democratic discourse. If I talked about Waxman-Markey in the same language and on the same terms that I use to talk to myself about the lights in my own house, I would sound like a Little Hitler too. And that's a non-starter. And I care way too much about climate change to allow it to continue unabated because a bunch of environmentalists mistakenly believe that democracy is less natural or less real or less of a force than the rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.

So I am giving myself a break in the name of fighting climate change. I am going to take the elevator, guilt free, and stop looking for manual doors instead of automatic ones, and stop collecting my usual (and embarrassing) damp sack of teabags at work that I usually bring home to my compost pile, and otherwise curb the relentless urge to eco-ritualize every single choice, and instead I am going to write my congresspeople and the White House and tell all those people that I support Waxman-Markey, despite its imperfection, despite its slow start. I am doing this after rationally calculating how much more effective it is to fight for large-scale compromise than it is to continue this rigid, private, WALL-E meets Rainman meets Bill McKibben kind of life that I used to call "action" in the Bush Dark Ages.

And I sincerely hope you join me.