Earth Day 2008

As a child, I imagined myself incorporeal, a changeling. I weighed very little and ate very little and endowed all objects under my protection with souls. Guided by my mega-Virgo propensity for compulsive cataloguing and my family's secular humanist social conscience, I soon discovered the meaning of life -- not simply to tread lightly upon the earth, but to atone for the waste, excesses, and damage wrought by the entire human race.

I often lay in bed, imagining the huge pile of refuse -- much larger than my actual body -- I had created just by living. I imagined the skin cells and the snot and the vomit and the paper plates and the candy wrappers. I imagined pulling this pile of evergrowing crap after me like a sled dog until I expired from exhaustion.

In my twenties, I tried to tell my then-therapist of the clamour of things -- the broken things and the mending, the unloved things and the lost things, the unsorted things and the things I could not bear to throw out. She was all for talking about deeper issues, but soon an army of clutter consultants and responsible living enthusiasts and feng shui practitioners were to create an entire industry from what I came to see not as personal pathology, but as the pervasive malady of late-stage capitalism.

A friend told me, as we watched a stunning lunar eclipse from my rooftop, that even the most remote, deepest, pristine nether realms of the ocean were now covered with plastic bits and soda cans. I read in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon that the entire forest adjacent to Mexico City had been suffocated into deadwood by blowing plastic bags. I despaired.

When my closest college girlfriend invited me to her domestic partnership ceremony, my first response, before congratulations, was to ask whether I might bring my collection of hundreds of unused plastic takeout utensils across the country for use at her reception.

I was hyper-vigilant when shopping, anticipating the very moment when I might interrupt the checker's autopilot with a clear, "No bag, please." I devised rules for living that were only revealed as somewhat strange when I had visitors -- no buying of plastic wrap or napkins or Kleenex; these all could be scavenged from overpackaging; reuse of all bags and containers and Styrofoam peanuts; dilution of all detergents and cleansers so they lasted years and years and years.

My income was half as much as New Yorkers continually reassured one another was the bare subsistence level. My apartment was tinier still. I'd always shopped at thrift stores and delayed any sort of gratification involving consumption. My weekly routine involved bringing piles of things to thrift stores, haunting the library sale alcove, memorizing the rotating specials at my local grocery. Daily I sorted through email from Freecycle and socially responsible living newsletters and admonitions from Flylady.net that turning my home into a personal landfill did not save the earth.

As a cater waiter, I would carry huge sacks of one-time-use champagne flutes home with me in a cab to recycle them in my home bin. Appalled by the casual waste I saw my temporary office job, I made a crusade of using one paper coffee cup until it fell apart; of never, ever leaving any trash in my office can; of carrying around a single plastic plate in protest of the hundreds discarded every day in the lunchroom.

But, increasingly, I felt impotent. How could I cancel out the five cups my officemate discarded every day? Although I rooted through our trash after he left for the day, picking out recyclables; although I would sooner use a paper towel from the floor of the bathroom than pull out a new one, I was not even making the tiniest dent in the tide of refuse. Even my own sled of sinful discard was heavier.

I know people who are more rigorous still. A friend married a man who lives entirely on scavenge, from food to furniture. A certain sort of dumpster diving activates my gag reflex, but I’ve certainly fallen from my preteen Café Society aspirations. Just last week I rescued a perfectly good pillowcase, still in the package, from my building’s garbage cans, in full view of my lurking landlord.

Increasingly, my clothes come from piles left by the curb on moving day each month, rather than from thrift stores. Sometimes I feel a ping, a slight burst of shame, especially on weekend nights in my neighborhood, as I root through piles of trash adjacent to the expensively dressed crowd milling in front of Le Table.

The payoff? A muted orange rag, upon inspection, was yards and yards of untouched organza, bundled inside a black trash bag, just perfect for covering my new-from-the-street loveseat.

I take a perverse pride in all this, a pride not at all to do with masochism or unworthiness or of rags-to-riches rescue fantasies. I imagine that it’s similar to the pride emanating from those rarified souls of the breathatarian lifestyle who have transcended food, and subsist on air alone.

Somehow, imperceptibly, I crossed from responsible and proactive to obsessive-compulsive and strange. There was that moment, on my hands and knees in the tub, scrubbing another woman's menstrual blood out of a pair of otherwise pristine panties I’d discovered among a bundle I rescued from a ripped-open garbage bag amid the slush on the corner of Bleecker and Bowery; there was that moment where I looked down and thought, as if my hands were not my own: how has it come to this?

And yet. It's the least I could do.