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Increasing the Environment*

A daily log chronicles the sacrifices one man makes for the good of the planet.


I read a lot of magazines. I know that’s not very green. But I have to know what’s going on. And I feel gross bringing my laptop into the bathroom. I especially read a lot of magazines about awesome (and usually expensive) furniture. I used to love the design magazine Nest because the people in there would do stuff like wrap their staircases in electrical tape and then be all proud of it. It was a magazine less about being crazy-rich than being simply plain old crazy.

Anyway, Nest is long gone. So now I like Domino. It seems aimed at 23-year-old women, but I like it anyway. I especially like its feature about eco-people and their green lives, written as a daily timetable (“11 a.m.: Jet to Paris. To offset my carbon footprint I log on to a website that plants trees in your name and have Oregon personally reforested. Slide on Hermès sleep mask and slumber righteously.”). Here’s my own green day:

6 a.m.: Be kissed awake by the roar of garbage trucks. They say RECYCLING on the side, but I think they don’t mean it since it seems they dump all the recycling bin stuff right in with the other trash. Smell their exhaust through my open bedroom window. We have no air-conditioning. This already makes me way greener than almost all of you. How will you catch up to Eco-Me?

6:20 a.m.: Stand on my apartment balcony drinking green tea. I’d buy the fair-trade kind, but it doesn’t taste as good. And none of it tastes as good as grape soda. But that’s a sacrifice I make for the planet.

7 a.m.: Wash dishes from night before. Scrub the sink with environmentally friendly yet useless powder that is not as good as Comet. Feel despair over white enamel slowly turning brown.

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