CON GAMES: The Greenest Generation

April 22nd, 2007 at 09:40am Michael Conniff 2

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA--I remember the first Earth Day like it was the last one because I don’t remember any other one in between.

It was 1972 and my high school class had a brilliant but occasionally bizarre biology teacher name Edward Camara—he was known as “The Doctor”—who was way ahead of the curve on all this. We left campus with plastic garbage bags that were probably not biodegradable but we plucked trash from the planet that day like it was better than cash.

Then we, us, you, all of us, more or less forgot about the whole things until sometime after 9/11. The politics of ecology all but disappeared. Nobody cared or at least not much at best. The world went on. We baby boomers boomed. We got fatter if not happier. We all bought SUVs (though not me). We ate Rain Forest Crunch from Ben & Jerry’s but paid it never no mind.

Green was gone.

Now, today, this morning, on the first day of the rest of our life as a planet, I am in a “green” hotel with green apples on the front desk and green soap and green conditioner in the bathroom from a company I’ve never heard of called Ecossentials. This happenstance on Earth Day 2007 was entirely accidental. The Hotel Carleton on Sutter Street here in San Francisco takes good care of the essentials of living on the run but also hosts a wine tasting every afternoon at 5 PM that is swarmed by dozens of people who know a good deal when they see one. On Friday evening I came down to the lobby and took a left down the corridor to a small conference room where the hotel was showing Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on a complimentary basis with free popcorn and bottled water.

For every person watching the movie—five of us—there were six or seven people drinking wine in the lobby, and I tried not to see this as a sign that we were doing too little, too late. Most if not all of the wine drinkers in the lobby were a lot younger than me, but they will of course be the cohort who points the finger no end at Baby Boomers like me for what we have done to this earth.

What have we done?

At best, not enough. At best, we were distracted by babies and careers and greed and then the prospect of comfort. When there was no obvious reason to care about such things we cared not at all. Now that the science is obvious we don’t care enough, but we are also not alone in our convenient distance from the truth. The truth, after all, is inconvenient, and we are the generation who invented the convenience store to institutionalize the notion that convenience is worth paying that much more for.

As I ate the free popcorn and watched the free movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” made me realize just how bad things have become on the way to worse. The irony is that we won’t have to pay for what we’ve done, unless you count Hurricane Katrina as an early payback. When the bill comes do, the greenest generation will be long gone, like Astroturf at the Superdome.

Remember this about us as you spit on our graves: we had better things to do.

Entry Filed under: Environment, Politics, Colorado, Con Games, Travel, Pitkin County, Outdoors, The West