| Main Feature Story - Friday, March 28, 2008
Feature: Almost green
Can Marin moms toot their horns about the environment from the front seat of an SUV?
by Joy Lanzendorfer
"When I saw Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, I lay awake all night worrying about it," Katie Tuttle tells a group of Marin moms. "When I woke up the next morning, I had my first gray hair. Then my husband said that instead of complaining so much about it, I should do something."
Tuttle is speaking at an EcoMom Alliance meeting. The group wants moms all over the country to become more environmentally aware and is working to give them the tools to live a greener lifestyle. The meeting is at founder Kimberly Danek Pinkson's San Anselmo home—a small, rented bungalow. Sitting around her cozy living room are "EcoMom Leaders," women who have volunteered to help with the burgeoning movement.
Also at the meeting is Peter Bick, a filmmaker who is making a documentary on global warming. Bick, whose films have won awards at festivals like South by Southwest in Austin, is part of a wave of interest in EcoMom Alliance. Since The New York Times wrote a piece on the organization in February, Pinkson has been contacted by everyone from The Today Show to 20/20.
Pinkson explains to the group that she wanted a way for moms to get together over the environmental crisis, so she started EcoMom Parties. Like Tupperware parties or book groups, women at an EcoMom Party gather at someone's house, have some wine and cheese and then share tips on issues like changing out their light bulbs to energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL) or where to get reusable grocery bags.
"It's about connecting with each other," says Pinkson. "So often I would go to sleep and think to myself, did I connect with anybody today? I mean really connect with anybody?"
Pinkson goes over the 10 first steps of her EcoMom Challenge, simple ways to start living a more sustainable lifestyle. The steps include driving more efficiently; shopping local, fair trade and organic; and planting a tree. But as the conversation evolves, the complexities of these issues quickly emerge. If you can't get food that's local and organic, is it better to buy local non-organic food that has been sprayed with pesticides or organic food that has been shipped 3,900 miles from Chile? Should you dump your inefficient SUV and buy a green car, or is it better to use your SUV for the rest of its useful life so you are consuming less?
And Marin, with its many affluent residents, has the added problem that living greener usually means a level of self-denial.
"This is a hard sell in an affluent community," says Chrise deTournay Birkhahn, a mom from San Rafael who is on the EcoMom Alliance Board of Directors. "It's not just putting on the brakes, it's driving in reverse."
DeTournay Birkhahn's driving metaphor applies in more ways than one. While the moms may be willing to make small changes, less convenient lifestyle choices—like riding Marin's public transportation system instead of driving, for instance—don't come up or are quickly dismissed. Which begs the question: How many Marin parents who were inspired by Al Gore's documentary are willing to take on the "inconvenient" with the "truth"?
That some Marin moms do care deeply about the environment there is no doubt. They are acutely aware of the anxiety that lies between their privilege and their desire to do good. They talk about worry—the worry they are not doing enough or that they will make a mistake. Tuttle, a teacher, confesses she's worried about leaving battery chargers plugged in the wall of her classroom over Easter break because of the amount of power they will draw during her absence. And deTournay Birkhahn is concerned about collecting too many of the plastic tubs that food like salsa and yogurt come in, which are not recyclable. At this point, she has 60 of them and she won't throw any away.
"What we need is an earth diet and exercise plan," she says to the other women. "It would be so nice to know the maximum calories we can earn today if we don't want to gain weight. It would be so much less stressful to know if you've actually been good."
Origins of the EcoMom
In June 2006, Pinkson co-produced an event for the United Nations World Environment Day. Afterwards, she and some of her mom friends were at Donner Lake in the Sierra mountains. One of the moms was explaining how after attending World Environment Day, she had gone home and changed out her light bulbs to CFLs. The conversation immediately took off, with one mom after another perking up and asking about CFLs and other changes they could make in their daily lives.
"We were literally at a picnic table," says Pinkson. "The conversation was at one end and I was at the other end, and I watched as it took off like wildfire down the table. I was blown away [by] the power of mothers as role models and as a market force. And I thought, somebody needs to do something with this."
Soon after, Pinkson got the idea of the EcoMom. Mothers do 85 percent of the household buying in the U.S.—that's $2.1 trillion—and are major educators of the next generation. Pinkson believes all it takes to harness this power is connecting these moms and showing them what to do. As each mom changes, the family changes, then the neighborhoods, towns, states and finally the whole country, maybe even the world.
"It's about first steps," says Pinkson. "There are other people doing the deep green work, but I feel like somebody needs to help the people who aren't hip to the green changes yet. They need someone to hold their hand and tell them they can do this."
Pinkson founded EcoMom Alliance in December 2007. Now, four months later, she is hearing from moms from all over the world who want to have EcoMom Parties and become EcoMom Leaders. She has set up conference calls to help these women organize chapters in their own communities. The group is also starting a campaign to get Marin moms composting in their backyard. Composting, the act of letting household organic waste, like vegetable clippings and coffee grounds, rot, is good for gardens and reduces the size of landfills. The campaign will educate moms about composting and may result in discounted bins for residents.
"It's a three-pronged approach," says deTournay Birkhahn, who is spearheading the composting initiative. "So you teach your children about nature through the compost, you reduce the food scraps—which account for a quarter of what goes in a dump—and in the process, you reduce the size of the pickup bin, which saves you money. I was shocked when I did that. The price of my garbage bill [was] cut in half."
But EcoMom Alliance's biggest achievement so far is the EcoMom Parties. They have been popping up all over the Bay Area and are inspiring even those moms who already consider themselves pretty eco-savvy.
Paige Rodgers, a mom from Corte Madera, went to an EcoMom Party recently after she was invited to donate some of her green-friendly Fabkins—cloth napkins for kids—to the party's goody bag. Although environmentally aware, Rodgers did pick up a few pointers about healthy eating from an expert on alternative medicine who spoke at the meeting.
"It was a really informal dialogue on a very important topic," she says. "They brought in an expert in the field and we were lucky enough to listen and ask questions from someone who was truly knowledgeable. And you were surrounded by other moms that believe in the importance of helping the environment. It was a really well-done event."
Like Rodgers, Ruthie Moutasian, a Mill Valley mom, was inspired when she went to an EcoMom Party. Although she works in the environmental field, she liked the energy of the group and was reminded that she wanted to make a change in her cleaning products.
"I think we all learned the importance of changing all the cleaning products," she says. "I know what I use is not the best, but I haven't really taken the time to start using ones that are biodegradable and nontoxic."
Even in eco-friendly Marin, an EcoMom Party can surprise a mom by what she does and doesn't know.
"In Marin there is a sense of being so educated, so evolved here, and we do so much of this already," says Pinkson. "But there are so many people in Marin who don't even know what a CFL is. They will raise their hands at the party and say, 'Wait, wait, back up, I don't know what you're talking about.'"
Lifestyle Environmentalism
Recently, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured several episodes on living environmentally. On one, Oprah's audience got a personal lecture from Al Gore about global warming. On another, they learned tips strikingly similar to the ones in EcoMom Alliance's 10 first steps: switch to nontoxic cleaning products, unplug appliances from your wall when you're not using them and change those light bulbs out, among other things.
More recently, Oprah had a show on "Freegans," people who choose to live outside society by consuming as little as possible. Among them were an executive and a married couple who choose to Dumpster dive for perfectly good food that others have thrown away. They also try not to buy anything new.
At a commercial break, Oprah, wearing conspicuous designer shoes, acknowledged the irony that she was doing a show about stopping consumption while pausing for commercials that were trying to sell people something. Still, the next day, many environmental blogs called the show hypocritical.
Although EcoMom Alliance has nothing to do with Oprah, it may be garnering so much attention because someone as high profile as Oprah is drawing attention to these issues. After all, Oprah speaks to the same audience EcoMoms do: women and mothers.
And like Oprah, the group has received criticism because of its perceived wealth. After all, Marin County has one of the highest median incomes in the state. The median house price is $935,000. Marin's global footprint—the amount of land it takes to sustain a person—is 27 acres per person compared to 24 acres for the average American.
In some ways, being in Marin has opened EcoMom Alliance up to criticism. On the other hand, being in Marin affords the group unique exposure that it wouldn't have if it were in, say, Kansas. Actress Robin Wright Penn is an EcoMom; her picture and a quotation from her are on the front page of the group's Web site (www.ecomomalliance.org ).
But for people like Alex Steffen, executive editor of Worldchanging.com , an environmental blog based in Seattle, the small steps EcoMom Alliance advocates are only good if they lead to bigger steps. If, as some scientists say, we are only 10 years away from an environmental catastrophe, "we need to change big things: how we get energy, how we stop sprawl and build compact communities, how we grow our food and fibers, how we design the products in our homes, even the very chemistry underlying our industrial economy," says Steffen. "None of these things can be done by moms, or anyone else, acting alone."
Rather than small steps building to great change, Steffen is concerned that making lifestyle changes will simply lull people into thinking they are helping and continue to ignore the bigger issues. What's more, in an area like Marin, small changes are simply not enough.
"It is hypocritical," he says. "Affluent people who care at all about the environment have the responsibility to invest the time to actually know their ecological footprints and spend the money to make real change in their lives and communities to bring those footprints down to a sustainable one-planet level. Otherwise, 'being green' just becomes an exercise in self-deception."
Pinkson, who is not wealthy herself, is well aware of these issues. In fact, she even wondered if her SUV made her unworthy of starting the group.
"My first response was to think of my SUV," she says. "I have one because we go to Lake Tahoe. And I thought, Oh my gosh, how dare I speak on any of this when I have an SUV?"
But this emotion, she found, was common among the mothers. Many moms feel a deep guilt about their choice of buying an SUV. Others feel bad that they aren't driving a Toyota Prius.
"All those people who have SUVs, should they not do anything else?" says Pinkson. "Should they just throw up their hands because they have a car? SUVs are certainly awful for the environment, but it's easy to focus on it. Instead, you can say to these moms, next time you buy a car, I hope you will buy one that is better for the environment, but for now, we're hoping you will drive more efficiently."
Perhaps the most striking thing about the EcoMoms is how often feelings of fear and guilt come up. When deTournay Birkhahn recently took a trip to Ecuador, she felt a flood of relief that she didn't have to be so consumed by her own waste.
"It was nice not to have to make a decision every moment of what to put in the garbage," she says. "It was nice to disconnect from it for a while. I didn't realize until I was away from the stress and felt the absence of it, I thought, Oh my god, I was really stressed!"
Rodgers has similar emotions. Often, when she has to throw things out that she knows will end up in a landfill, she has flashes of guilt.
"Every time I forget my reusable bags at the grocery store I feel terrible," she says. "I justify it by getting a paper bag and we use those in the recycling bin."
This phenomenon, called EcoAnxiety, is becoming commonplace. Stress and guilt are a part of American life, especially for mothers. The average mom is balancing roles as a career person, mother and wife. The climate crisis can easily become another weight on her back.
Other mothers are overwhelmed by the implications of global warming, which can feel terrifying. And since Americans consume more than their fair share of resources, much of the responsibility for the climate problem is put on our shoulders.
"There is so much negative information coming at people on a daily basis in regards to environmental and social issues, so much scary stuff coming at us, that it's like a deer in headlights," says Pinkson. "A person freezes and says, there's nothing I can do. So they do nothing and nothing is changed."
For other people, the guilt is about their children. Many worry about the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation, others about the toxins and carcinogens they have unwittingly fed their children.
"Women go—Oh my gosh, what do you mean? I'm feeding my kids toxins!" says Rodgers. "So these issues do bring things up like—Oh my gosh, what choices have I made for my kid? I wasn't aware that there were toxins in that plastic bottle or that heating some food up in plastic in the microwave releases toxins."
Corporate America would like people to buy their way out of this guilt. Green consumerism has taken off. Every day, there seems to be a new product claiming to be environmentally friendly.
Some of this, like Rodgers's Fabkins, is simply a response to demand. As more people become aware of environmental problems, there's more of a need for alternative products. Since starting Fabkins six months ago, Rodgers has sold 1,600 sets around the country, far more than she ever expected.
"We are hitting a niche that was untapped here," she says. "It's a small thing, just a change from paper to cloth, but it's profound when you look at it over time and see how many paper napkins go to landfills. So it's a trendy issue, but it's also important."
But "green" is also a marketing term, and because there are no regulations over the word as there are for, say, the word "organic" for food, anyone can call anything green—whether it is or not. Major household cleaners are calling themselves green, but since the companies don't have to list the ingredients on the bottle, it's hard to tell if they are really earth-friendly or not.
Perhaps these examples demonstrate why people think going green is expensive. Yet often the greenest option is also the most frugal. By hanging laundry out to dry instead of running the dryer, the energy bill goes down. Making homemade cleaners out of nontoxic ingredients like water, baking soda, vinegar and lemon costs a fraction of even the cheapest store-bought cleaner.
And that, too, might be why EcoMoms seem odd in Marin. But while it might be difficult to imagine a wealthy mom out in the yard hanging her laundry, the tendency to judge her may be unfair. After all, she too is a mother who wants to do right by her children.
"We tend to think of it in a worst-case scenario situation," says deTournay Birkhahn. "But people here are really listening. They really care. They don't just have some wine and cheese at the EcoMom Party and walk away. They say, 'Oh, I didn't know. I didn't know. Thanks for telling me.'"
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