"You can't take the Earth for granted"

Yesterday I was talking with my Facebook friends about the World Economic Forum currently going on at Davos. I was feeling marginally 'morally superior' (in terms of carbon footprint) to some important people flying in their private jets to congregate at Davos to talk about climate change. But today I got such a unique perspective about climate change from my massage therapist, that I am completely blown away! And the most interesting thing is, he was not necessarily even thinking specifically about environmental toll of human activity when he said those profound words: "You can't take the Earth for granted!"

I have to give you some context.

Our firm arranges chair massages at work once a month for the employees. Some people just close their eyes and enjoy the massage quietly. I am not one of them. My masseur Dexter and I constantly chat during the massage sessions. So in the last five years of working together (more like Dexter would be working, and I would be worked on), we almost became friends. I know a bit about his family, his aspirations to become an actor (he did some modeling gigs already, and going to the new Steve Jobs movie shoot in San Jose on January 31), his occasional monotony with being a massage therapist and his episodic urges to try out some new career--typical of a mid-lifer. He just turned forty this January. So naturally the topic of our chat during today's session veered towards whether it feels special to reach forty. Dexter said, it wouldn't have felt special but for one of his clients giving him a truly unforgettable birthday present--the experience of flying in a small two-sitter plane above the Bay area. Apparently that client was a former marine and a thrill-seeker by nature, with obvious consequences on his body. Dexter's massages did him so much good with his aches and pains that he wanted to give Dexter something special for his fortieth birthday. This is what I call a win-win!

Dexter does not like flying per se. But his client convinced him to 'try something new and wild' and soak in the whole experience. They rented a small plane that was capable of doing 'tricks' that you see in the air shows. Dexter got to feel positive and negative 'g's with the plane nose-diving towards the ground from a height of 10,000 feet above the ground, and then going straight up! He got to know how to open a parachute if something bad happens. They even hit an air pocket while circling over the runway, waiting for the air traffic controller to give them clearance for landing.

"I felt alive!" Dexter said to me. "From up there, it was looking like Google Earth!" After all he is a massage therapist in the silicon valley! "It felt cleansing. It was like an out-of-body experience! As if I was temporarily detached from the challenges of daily life. As if I was given a chance to regroup to face the challenges once again when I come back on Earth!" Dexter is a philosopher. I know I am generalizing, but bartenders and massage therapists are frequently gifted that way.

After surviving the mini-turbulence caused by the air pocket, when the wheels of their plane finally kissed the ground, Dexter had a new appreciation for our old planet. "The Earth is too beautiful to spoil. You can't just dump your garbage on her. You can't just take her for granted."

This reminded me of something that I read in Space X's Anousheh Ansari's blog written in 2006 during her maiden space voyage. She wrote: "From the side windows in the little cabins and the docking compartment, where I sleep, you see the complete curvature of the Earth against the dark background of the universe. This view is actually my favorite because you see the “Whole” not the “Parts.” I always like to see the big picture before deciding or worrying about the pieces. I wish the leaders of different nations could do the same and have a world vision first, before a specific vision for their country."

The carbon budget for such an 'educational' trip to the outer space for the important people at Davos would probably be unjustifiable and much worse than flying the private jets to Davos. But part of me keeps hoping that we will be successful in teaching our children that we can't take the Earth for granted. Our generation is trying. Not all of the conversations are happening at high profile conventions. They are happening at our schools. At our homes. Thank you Bill Gates and Jimmy Fallon for giving us a chance to talk about 'poop water' with our kids.

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.