Green Marriage

I have frequently engaged in conversations involving various concepts of going green: from post-dinner idle rumination with friends about extreme green commute to work on a mule and demanding tax breaks for driving a “hybrid,” to serious brainstorming with inventors at a start-up company about how to make an air-powered coffee-maker. But, I was totally bowled when I read an article at CNN.com describing a local Indonesian government’s unique approach to weave green into public policy.

In the Garut province in Indonesia’s Java island, in an effort to alleviate the damages done by rampant deforestation, the local government has established rules that require every newlywed couple to plant at least three trees. While this is innovative in its own right, the government’s imagination didn’t stop there. In a master stroke to promote social and environmental greening simultaneously, the government requires couples to plant 50 more trees if they want to divorce.

Now, the devil’s advocate in me is saying that breaking up a marriage may prove to be ‘greener’ than sticking to a marriage, because by staying married you are depriving mother earth from 50 more trees, but one can always counter-argue that you are free to plant 50 saplings even without getting divorced. And, it has been already researched that a divorce does not only take an emotional, social, and economic toll, it takes an environmental toll too.

Some time ago, I read an article (http://news.msu.edu/story/970/), titled, “A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce is not Green.” The story described the findings of Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University, who studied the carbon footprint of a divorce. Though one can conclude by applying common sense that divorced households end up consuming more energy, --a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to a family of four or a family of two-- the article presented some mind-boggling quantitative data. For example, the number of rooms per person in divorced households is 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households. In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households.

We all knew that love keeps us green, figuratively speaking. Now we know that love keeps the planet green too.

A logical extension of the above research may be to study whether children who enjoy a stable, two-parent household exhibit greener habits and greater environmental awareness as they grow up and as an adult compared to their counterparts who grew up in a divorced household. That study may not be so linear though. A child from a divorced family may find solace and peace in the nature that he/she missed at home. That may lead him/her to appreciate nature more than the ‘happy’ child from the next door who flew to Disneyland with his parents to see the oxygen-depleting fireworks.

I guess, in a marriage, practicality is still the controlling factor that determines the degree of greenness. If your husband does not turn off the monitor every night, would you fight with him? The call is yours.