To be a good environmental citizen—and I mean a good citizen, not just an OK-I’ll-turn-off-the-lights-when-I-leave one—requires commitment and some meaningful lifestyle changes. Many of us know the yo-yo-dieting style of eco-consciousness: we dutifully recycle everything that can be recycled until we find in the fridge an open jar of spaghetti sauce that we’ll either need to throw out or enter into the Antiques Roadshow. The idea of opening it up in order to clean it out sufficiently for recycling is simply too much for us to bear, and pushing our ideals to the side for a moment, we toss it in the trash. But to make the world a better, healthier place for all the critters that live on it, we can’t only be good when it’s easy.
However, in the new book Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet: Everyday Things to Help Solve Global Warming, author Eric Sorensen has laid out some lifestyle changes that are (1) very manageable, and (2) highly effective in the war on warming. Unlike many other books in the eco-ilk, this one is light on the gloom-and-doom, offering instead some exceptionally sensible ideas on how to reduce one’s contributions to global meltdown.
The Seven Wonders of Sorensen’s book are a bit like George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television: we all know, or can guess, what they are, but we don’t like to say them out loud. Lifestyle changes are hard. Ride a bicycle to work? There are a million excuses not to. It’s too far; I don’t want to get all sweaty; I live in Seattle which is riddled with rain and really big hills; how can I carry my groceries, my kids, my laptop, my life? And yet, nearly 2 million Americans manage it every day, says Sorensen. We all know the automobile is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases (11,350 pounds of CO2 per American passenger car, according to Sorensen), but giving up driving seems impossible to most of us.
And herein lies the genius of Sorensen’s book. Not only does he present an array of cogent arguments in favor of abandoning the Beemer for the bike, he does so in a way that sounds imminently do-able. This isn’t just a call to action, it’s a (bicycle-friendly) road map. The same is true in all the other sections: here is something you can do, here are some very smart reasons for doing it, here’s the best way to go about it. (He is, thankfully, shy on details in the “how-to” section for condoms.) He makes the hard changes seem possible, even fun. How hard is it, really, to install a ceiling fan? Says Sorensen, a couple of hours’ work can net you 9°F (5°C) of cooling, and a one-third savings on your cooling bill. Wasn’t that easy? Don’t you feel better? Now, let’s talk about insulating your attic…
Sorensen understands the necessity of offering baby steps that go beyond the standard “buy the better light bulb.” Don’t sell your car, at least not yet, just substitute the bike for that trip to the post office or that one-thing-I-forgot run to the grocery store. You don’t have to pull up your air conditioner by the roots, just turn it up a little and make up the difference with a ceiling fan. Keep the dryer—but opt for the clothesline when you can.
This does not mean that Sorensen doesn’t have much bigger and more ambitious ideas—he certainly does, and they’re in here. It means he understands that a little improvement is better than none, and small steps often lead to big leaps forward. Changing behavior, even behavior we know is unhealthy, is hard: just ask the 62% of Americans who are overweight. A book that combines humor, accessibility of information, an optimistic outlook and best of all, baby steps, may just be the book to get us started on the path to sustainability.