extreme environmentalists might be crazy, says new york times

So my favorite blogger, Sharon Astyk, was featured in a New York Times article on "extreme approaches to living a green life." The article implies that people who go beyond recycling or using mass transit in their pursuit of a green lifestyle might be psychologically unhinged. Really.

I will admit there are some weird aspects of the lifestyles the article call "dark green," at least as they're described in the article. Why, for example, does Anita Levine scrub out and reuse ziplock bags--including ones that held dirty diapers--and yet use biodegradable instead of cloth diapers? (While she's at it, she could buy a diaper wetbag to hold used diapers and then throw the whole thing in the laundry, bypassing the need for at least one plastic bag. But maybe that's just me and my love for cloth diapers.) And David Chameides, who's collecting a year's worth of trash in his basement, might be a little crazy--but his stunt is no less strange than hundreds of other publicity stunts that we see all the time, and his blog is actually pretty interesting. And his most recent entry does a good job of negating the Times implication that these people are all crazy. "We all need to do the best we can," he writes, but "an occasional slip doesn't nullify everything else we are doing."

I couldn't agree more, and truthfully, I don't know anyone who lives a "dark green" lifestyle who doesn't realize that. Maybe there are people out there somewhere who "can't have something in [their] house that isn't green or organic" or "can't eat at a relative's house because they don't serve organic food," as the Times article warns against. If there are people like that, I've never met them, and frankly they clearly have psychological (or familial) issues that have nothing to do with wanting to live green. If it weren't organic food, for them, it would be something else.

But I think the mockery of the Times article goes deeper than that. It's easy to imagine the fullest extreme of something and then make fun of it. What's scary is that the people whom the article interviewed really aren't living in such an extreme way. They're doing a lot more than I am, admittedly, and more than nearly everyone in western society. But compared to the world at large, or the way most humans have lived throughout history, they're not strange at all. They don't use refrigerators? They hang their clothes to dry? They even--gasp!--grow some of their own food? You mean food doesn't grow on supermarket shelves?

Seriously, these are not strange activities. Growing food (in the ground), doing most work by hand instead of having lots of machines that do it for you, and taking care of your own waste products has been normal for most of human history. It's only in the last few hundred years that it's become possible, much less normal, to do otherwise. What's frightening to me is that now our culture has become so used to it that we view things like dryers and refrigerators not as labor-saving devices but as essentials for survival. We don't just think we need these things; we can't imagine living without them.

But the reality is that we can't live with them forever. It's possible that we might even have to live without them in our lifetimes. People who are already making do without them aren't crazy, and they aren't rejecting all human progress. In point of fact, they're ahead of the curve.

Self-denial and sacrifice have always been valued in Christian thought. It's good for our souls to live with less. It's even better for our souls if our living with less can also enable those worse off than us to live with more. "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen," writes the prophet Isaiah, "to share your food with the hungry?" (58:6-7) It's good to fast; it's better to fast so that someone else can eat. By using less energy, these "dark green" people are leaving more for others. That's not crazy at all. It's just Christian.