The Plight of The Green Girls

What is the most sustainable way to live sustainably?

Happy Sunday and welcome to Pancake Brain, a weekend newsletter dedicated to pop culture, politics, and the psychedelic experience.

Early Monday morning, I spoke to a climate activist from Norway, a student named Sofie, who is collaborating on a new blog called Green Girls. Sofie told me that to be a green girl meant radically reducing consumption; eating vegetarian, only buying second-hand clothes, and never flying. No exceptions. Sofie and her friends wanted to be as eco-conscious as humanly possible, but it was getting harder, what with climate agreements being ripped up and littered in the ocean. The green girls were forced to admit they had grown tired.

Sofie called to interview me. She reached out to say she was inspired by my book, How to Start a Revolution: Young People and The Future of American Politics. I felt compelled to tell her my book is based on a flawed premise, because the title is obviously very stupid, and democracy is dead. Instead, I wrote back to Sofie that I changed a lot since I was so online. We decided to talk anyway. “No flying, as in never, no matter what?” I asked at early evening in Oslo. “Not even if someone in your family is about to die?” It just so happened this was the same day that Jeff Bezos threw his wife a party in space.

“We started admitting we were sick of all the rules,” Sofie told me. She and her friends were whispering to each other that they secretly wanted to go on vacation. It felt good to go to the store and buy a pair of new jeans that actually fit. Also, after vowing to only ever use an eco-conscious dry shampoo in powder form, one green girl broke down and went aerosol. Sofie wrote about the burnout in a Norwegian newspaper, and found more green girls riddled with guilt, but still wanting to figure out how to keep being eco-conscious in a world where even the simple act of enjoying Taylor Swift means condoning the use of a private jet.

When I reflect on my early twenties, I was applying those same kind of meticulous regulations to an eating disorder. There was an arbitrary absurdity to the granularity of the green girl rules, while far more laudable in intention, still smacking of that self-punishing self-consciousness, the ingrown hair of internalized shame that certainly costs more energy than one more seat on an airbus. Eco-consciousness seemed like a dressed-up version of perfectionism, but, of course, only wearing clothes from the local thrift store. I told Sofie the whole thing sounded exhausting. She laughed and said lightly, “That’s why we need to figure out how to do this in a way that is sustainable.”

I had to tell Sofie that, while I’m proud of the interviews in my book, I’m embarrassed of the person who wrote it, especially my insane belief that you had to do political activism in order to be a good person. Heck, I thought writing that book was going to make me happy. And it did. For fifteen minutes, when the demon burped and growled, “What’s next?” You can do just about anything for the wrong reasons. That includes praying, running a marathon, doing the stuff of political activism, and certainly volunteering with a bad attitude. The critical litmus test that determines whether any given rule contributes to authentic ethical action in our shared goal of planetary evolution always comes down to the vibe.

Sofie and I talked about this. Feeling kind and connected, and what that open-hearted energy does in the world. The perspective of interconnectedness works wonders toward a sustainable future of human flourishing. The impact of compassionate consciousness in your immediate environment is ineffable, but surely more effective than any given form of dry shampoo. When you’re in a happy place, no one has to tell you to do the right thing. Happy people go ahead and put the cart back at the supermarket. Really happy people are inspired to change the world, they fulfill their destiny, and it’s nice to be around them, even at the airport. What if the most important thing we can do for the Earth is to free our minds to be inspired?

As bleak as the current climate landscape, it helps to remember that it will forever change completely. I shared with Sofie a recent conversation I had with my father, a chemist who works in waste management, about the nature of environmental regulations. We started on the miraculous note of newfound whales and dolphins in the waters of New York and New Jersey. As the president of a waste-management company, he saw the shift as traceable to the Clean Water Act of 1985, which, as I understand it, stopped sewage from mixing with rain and turning into a giant toilet. He also mentioned the unpredictable nature of prediction, citing the supposed problem of peak oil that began his career now flipped on its head as he headed for retirement. And just think how much technology has been invented since 1985. One thing that’s guaranteed is that everything can and will forever change, or, as my dad put it with an east coast shrug, “You have to make space for human innovation. That’s what we do. We solve problems.”

After my conversation with Sofie, I kept thinking that the green girls most precious commodity is their own energy, the life force that leaps into genius, and connects us to our communities. We are not only precious commodity, but a renewable resource. In any given moment, your most valuable resource is your attention, your energy, your life force. And so it could be said the most eco-conscious thing any consumer could do is stop feeding our souls to the robots.

“I cannot give up social media,” Sofie laughed. She shook her head, and I couldn’t argue. Social media had connected our call. Without it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The problem is our unconscious use of social, or rather, what happens when we let social media use us. If only quitting social media was as convenient as boycotting air travel.

Even after spending the better part of five years offline, I am struck by the invisible string that drags my finger to the familiar icons, where I find myself scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, and feeling the life force draining out of my body, and still scrolling some more. I’m barely online now, and so it’s that much more obvious when I’m mindlessly online that there is an evil robot vacuuming the energy out of my chest and turning it into pennies. But we all know this. The billionaires are trading our consciousness for cash, and not even bothering to suggest that the profits of social media have anything to do with social wellbeing, never mind paying for social security.

We are each our own most valuable resource, and our greatest eco-unconscious crime of consumption is allowing ourselves to be consumed by the algorithms, which is to say nothing of the electrical energy powering the planned obsolescence of all those lithium batteries, or the gallons of water sucked up into thirsty vats of AI. In each choice we make as consumers we must fight the crushing weight of our atomized insignificance, shrunk down into infinitesimal specks of shit from the zoomed-out perspective of our overlords leaving the atmosphere. It’s not easy being green when the mere possibility of the billionaires caring about the Earth seems as pale as our blue dot.

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