Generation Magazine

By Melissa Wright

I pick up my printouts prior to a meeting at work this past week. Oh man—15 pages each. What a jerk. I bring them into the meeting with my colleague, who will remain anonymous (in terms of industry importance—think  Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada”).

I hand her copy to her. “I feel guilty printing these out. At least they’re double-sided,” I say.

“We’ll be gone when the world ends anyway. Unless, you believe in 2012,” my anonymous colleague retorts, her hands crossed, effortlessly existential.

“No, I don’t subscribe to that theory,” I say, feeling a bit silly now for “caring,” as if I’d hopped on the “my generation matters and isn’t another flash in the pan” bandwagon.

This particular colleague also has no children and I wonder how this impacts her wave of the hand, earthy disregard. Not that I have children, but, hell, I kind of want to preserve the human race, as outlandish as that sounds. As Richard Wright so eloquently put it, “We’ve come a long way,” us humans, us earth. We might as well try to keep this going.

Richard Wright posits his optimism for the preservation of humankind (aka how to avoid apocalyptic war raining down like hellfire) through a game theory formula called non-zero-sumness (catch the talk on Ted.com). While this isn’t related to sustainability in the ecological sense per se, human selfishness is the core of our moral beings.

In other words, we’re all in this thing together (great song by Old Crow Medicine Show, btw) and the trash in your backyard is ultimately the same as me having trash in my backyard (and not just because the potentially toxic trash can leak into my water

supply, though that also sucks). You lose, I lose. You win, I win. In other words, thank god Kim Jong Il likes American popular culture, and China needs us just as much as we need them. Hallelujah, e’ery body. Let’s have a global party and bury our nuclear warheads.

OK. Lost track there for a minute. Sustainability. So, ultimately, I think, it needs to be personal. If it doesn’t affect me, why should I partake? Very Hobbesian. Take care of yourself first and morality will triumph in acts of projected self-love and preservation.

It is for this reason—this self-love—that you can find people touting their go-green shopping bags, their smug, organic cotton T-shirts that read “Compost.” You want to feel good about this whole sustainability phenomenon, and you know what? You should. You deserve it, you.

So, what makes it personal for me? I have a very demanding aesthetic. I want to live in a beautiful place. Maybe this has something to do with my pack-rat father who saved everything in our basement, like a subterranean, domestic landfill. I recycle because I can imagine the life of that take-out container (which are not even recyclable in Buffalo, mind you!!!) traveling into the dump truck, and piling up at the landfill, and landfills make me feel claustrophobic. It is probably best that I don’t know that landfills typically recycle your non-recycled shit anyway, because the idea of a landfill growing like a malignant tumor, smoking cigarettes and going fake tanning, keeps me green.

So, you know what, I would like you to recycle this issue after you read it, but don’t do it for me, your mom, society, earth or your significant other, as that is simply not sustainable. Do it for you. Self-love may just save the world.

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