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By Root 531 0

heat your home with gas, oil, electricity, coal, or wood; or buy organic salad greens in plastic containers (recycling only saves you half a demerit). And being guilty of any of these makes you an enabler. For instance, by buying tomatoes in plastic wrap, in your own small who-me? way, you have enabled the plastic manufacturer, the food distributor, and the supermarket by signaling to them that it was all kinds of acceptable to produce such products in such a fashion. And that gas for your car—it was delivered at such low prices that it helped fuel both you personally and the unprecedented growth in the world’s economy for the last century. Yes, you’re welcome.

And although I ended up finding very little oil personally (small comfort to either the environmental cause or my former oil company bosses), I still search for ways to be a better citizen in the last half of my life than I was in the first. What I’ve found is this: the effort that takes the most amount of actual work (recycling, composting—I try to do it all now) might make me feel a lot better about myself, but it’s the small, effortless piece of work that has the true potential to change the outcomes of global warming and looming environmental catastrophe. It’s called voting.

Voting has a bad rep on the Personal Responsibility List exactly because it is so easy to do, and well, hey—it’s only one vote. But I ask you to consider this: what has the greater chance of creating real change in this world, your compost pile or the installation of progressive, rational, and influential political leaders to run this scene? This is a great nation—we have won world wars, invented the Internet, jazz, baseball, and peanut butter cups, and put guys on the moon. This nation and its people can do big things, do them successfully, and help the rest of the world achieve important goals. We have the money, we have the technology, and we have always been a nation that accepts personal sacrifice for the greater good: we’re set to roll! But we need our government to get with the program. Not an easy task, and not something that I have the perfect answer to. But someone does, and ideally they are ready to risk their political capital on successfully addressing global warming. If not, they don’t get my vote, and they shouldn’t get yours, either.

Readers of such a wonderful book as this, and especially those who find this particular essay intelligent and thought provoking, probably are good citizen-voters already. While such an assumption comes a little too close to blaming the low voter turnout on people-other-than-you-and-me, let’s accept that premise, at least for the remainder of this paragraph. In the last presidential election, 121 million Americans voted. Let’s assume that only 10 percent are really concerned about the environment and global warming (polls suggest that there are many more than that). And let’s say that only half of those are really, really, really concerned, enough to go out and convince one—only one—person they know who either regularly votes for the Other Party or doesn’t vote at all to vote for the candidate with the most progressive and aggressive plan to save this planet. We’re talking about only the most concerned, wild-eyed progressives here, just convincing one—one!—voter each. If that happened, everything would be different. Even the supposed difference between Red and Blue states amounts to a couple of percentage points either way. It’s that close, people. Most of our dinner party chats involve talking with people who think like us. Find someone who doesn’t. Talk to him or her. Go back to the cheese platter and wait; someone will show up. But if you think that the voter-turnout problem lies somewhere else, to paraphrase the great comics character Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is our friend and neighbor. And perhaps one’s self as well.

Researchers have found evidence of recycling and composting by our ancestors during Paleolithic times. Look what good it did them. And yes, recycling and composting, along with driving fuel-efficient cars, are great