Green

Ever since the first Earth Day forty years ago, I've tried to be ecologically responsible. In 1970, I tried driving 50 on the highway in my old Plymouth Duster and got about 35 MPG, whereas before it'd been closer to 27 or so. Then I bought a little Honda Civic back in 1976. I added foam board insulation to the walls of an already-insulated house that I restored in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, back in the late 70s. (My wife said it wouldn't gain us anything in resale value, but two years later when the house was done and the economy was in the crapper, people were excited about the extra insulation.) I won a cash award for building a superinsulated house in Maine back in the eighties.

None of which is is blow my own horn. I'm just saying, I'm glad the world is catching up. It's been frustrating for years. While Hummers gained popularity and SUVs ruled the roads, I wondered where the conscientious people were. Now smaller cars are becoming popular again and, more importantly, people are seeing conservation as a priority.

What really drove it home for me was seeing a popular comic strip recently in which a character rants about people changing oil every 3,000 miles instead of 6,000. When pop culture uses "green" topics as a teaching/humor tool, that's good. Consumer Reports actually discovered years ago, in controlled tests, that there was no significant advantage to changing the oil in one's car every 3,000 miles---that 6,000-mile changes were just as effective.They also pointed out that if everyone who changes every 3,000 would do it half as often, hundreds of thousands of gallons of tainted oil would be eliminated from the waste stream every year. But still people think 3,000-mile oil changes make sense.

About fifteen years ago, I began washing every foam meat or vegetable tray we got from the store and began storing them in my attic, on the theory that someday they would be recyclable and I would have kept all those trays out of the landfill. After a year or so, I gave up. Now I have some extra insulation up there, but I don't think those trays will ever be reused in any other way. Oh well. Sometimes you're ahead of your time--and sometimes you're just overly compulsive. Can't win 'em all. But I'm feeling like I--we--are winning on some important stuff.