We turned off all the lights, we shut down the computers, and we unplugged the TV (you’d be surprised how much wattage a TV draws even when it is off).  We lit some candles.  And we hung out around a large 3-wick candle in the living room chatting and snacking on Cheez-its.  My daughter told revisionist fairy tales while my wife took pictures of the kids in the candlelight and my son tried his best to resist the urge to blow out the candles (he caved a few times before the evening was over – luckily I kept the lighter close by).  After the hour was up, my wife got our girl settled down with a candle as a temporary night-light and I got the little tike into his fire-engine bed for the night.  Eventually, I turned on the fan and crept out while my wife blew out the candle in our daughter’s room and headed to bed herself.

Being the night-owl I am, I’m still up, but headed to bed shortly.  But I have managed not to turn on a light so far except briefly in the bathroom.  I did turn on my laptop though … and I plugged back in the TV to attempt to watch SNL (a rerun with Alec Baldwin – he was good, but the rest was meh).

I generally think of myself as environmentally conscious – I try to save water and energy when I can.  But in truth it is easy to be lax about it.  I’ve had the TV plugged into a power strip so that I could turn it off when it wasn’t in use, but we never seem to actually turn it off.  I replaced most of the bulbs in the house with compact fluorescents, but I still need to be mindful of how many lights I have on – my daughter has a desk lamp that seems to be on 24-7 as I keep forgetting to buy her a new night-light.  And we have had access to a compost bin for months but only got it set up and in use this week.  I guess now is better than never.  I plan to be a bit more mindful of these matters going forward both for the sake of eco-friendliness and financial sense.  I also plan to make sure that my kids understand the importance of such issues as the grow up.  After all, if the human race stands a chance, we need to start adopting smart habits earlier in life rather than spending decades in the dark and only then trying to change tack.

Currently, I have a job that I like more than any I’ve had before and I make more money than I’ve ever earned before (which helps me enjoy my job as well).  And yet I still find myself living paycheck to paycheck and seeing my health benefits get more expensive and less effective.  I can’t say that I’m struggling with money, but it would be nice to feel like I was getting ahead rather than just keeping pace (and hoping I’m not falling behind).

My wife is currently a full-time stay-at-home mom to our 2 kids.  This was a conscious choice as (a) our kids are a lot happier in these younger pre-school years not being in daycare all day and (b) even if she did work, it would cost all of her salary to keep the kids in daycare.  So her working would only earn us lost time together as a family.  And now she is considering getting a job anyway so that we can be more financially comfortable, but that will likely mean a part-time job during hours that I can be home with the kids (nights and weekends) which means it will likely be a low-paying retail job.

I really do want to be more eco-friendly in my lifestyle, but to do so is not cheap (and as illustrated above, I’m not really in a position to opt for friendly over frugal).  I WANT to eat more organic foods.  I WANT to produce less waste (as in garbage).  I WANT to purchase goods that use less packaging and more recyclable materials.  I TRY to use less water, less electricity, less plastic and chemicals.  But the next steps seem to be the ones that will cost me more.  It is hard to justify buying organic juice when the grocery store has a buy-one-get-one-free sale on Juicy Juice.  It is hard to justify driving 2 to 3 times as far to go to a Whole Foods market and pay 50% more for the same amount of food when gas is around $3.50 a gallon (I HAVE been trying to coast more to save on gas – it actually works when driving manual).  It is hard to say it is worth being green if it means possibly going into the red.

I am not overly worried – I will soldier on and I am optimistic that I will find the balance.  But I hope that the declarations that I hear on my TV are not hollow.  I know there are people in this country who are worse off than I and they need these promises to bare fruit.  They need the economic stimulus that a $300 tax rebate ain’t delivering.  They need the growth of industry and the moderation of big business that is currently lacking more than I do.  But if those things come, I plan to use whatever windfall I may reap of it to achieve the greenness that currently seems so elusive.

The setting of the movie is Earth some 800 years in the future.  And what we find is a landscape riddled with garbage.  And it would seem that the failure of society to avoid such a fate is directly tied to the success of american consumerism.  And what is truly scary about this nihilistic outlook is that it may not be much of an exaggeration.

While our behavior as Americans is not necessarily a precise mirror of the rest of the world, areas with small ecological footprints are in the minority among most cultures.  As a result of recent rhetoric (and unfortunately moreso due to movies like this one), the idea of living cleaner and greener is becoming more mainstream, but it will take more than a couple years of bashing the world over the head with the club of awareness to turn around millennia of unbridled growth and consumption.  We are like a caterpillar chowing down on leaves and only now realizing we may run out of leaves.  While we can try to manage our appetite to an extent, we are bound to grow or die and we can’t exactly switch trees.  In Wall-E, we found a way to build a cocoon – in many ways, I don’t think we are there yet.

One idea that I’ve long held that this movie affirmed was that whatever happens to us as a species – whether we recover and find balance or continue to consume and ravage the Earth until we collapse – the Earth will live on in spite of us.  This world we live in came to be through billions of years of coalescence and millions of years of evolution under more volatile circumstances than we observe today.  We could manage to wipe the slate clean through a nuclear holocaust or some other machination of destruction not yet imagined and it will simply mean a new chapter in a much longer story.  I’d like to think that we can find a way to continue beyond the chapter we are in.  I guess only time will tell.  If some of us can imagine a version of our future where in a world ravaged by our carelessness can result in an unlikely romance between a pair of robots that manage to wake up humanity by overzealously trying to do their jobs, then made there is hope.