Sometimes people seek out the Greenneck (god knows why) for his
views on things green and rural and renewable and whatnot. This
time, it was an overly polite young woman with a raspy cough, a college
student working on a documentary film or video-embedded website or
something like that. The Greenneck didn’t really understand.
She called him Mister and he corrected her and then they got down to
brass tacks. He turned down his music, a compilation of classic Iron
Maiden and early Metallica. He rambled for a while, talking about his
off-grid life and the contradictions that run through it and how it all
came about. At the end of their 40-minute conversation, she asked him
to summarize his feelings. And then, somewhat unexpectedly, it came
out, a three-word call to action that the Greenneck does not follow as
stridently as he could: “Stop buying crap.”

Can it be that simple? Maybe. Maybe.

He remembers a few weeks back, visiting at his wife’s cousin’s home in rural Connecticut.

 A nice spread by anyone’s standards, 3,500-square feet of refurbished
farmhouse, with an old barn and two acres of pond and trees and lawn.
They asked him about solar panels. They asked him about wind power.
They asked him about plug-in hybrid automobiles. They did not ask him
if they should reconsider the 1,500-square foot addition they’re
planning, or if perhaps they should try to drive less, or how to stem
the flow of plastic toys and video games that already overrun the large
room where their two boys spend many of their waking hours.

The Greenneck finds it vexing. The “green awakening” (a trite
phrase, but it will do) that’s sweeping this country is, perhaps
unsurprisingly, rooted in our collective faith in consumerism, in the
barbiturate we call buying. We have reached a place whereby the only
way to stimulate the economy is to send checks to the citizenry (and we
daren’t exclude the poor, for they’ll be the first to bust down the
doors of Wal-Mart with their “free” money in hand), where the only way
to wash the blood off our hands is to buy it off. An array of solar
panels – but better make it big, because we need to power the addition.
A Prius – but let’s keep the Jeep for weekends. Clothes of organic
cotton, and oh my, I must have that jacket, too.

We are fooling ourselves. We will not buy our way out of
anything: Climate change, Iraq, the financial crisis, energy shortages.
Each and every one of these issues has many roots, but perhaps only one
taproot, a subterranean vine feeding on our insatiable urge to consume.
Until we starve the taproot, the plant will flourish, and we’ll
continue our long slide.

To change course now would be painful; to change course later,
more so. And it’s not as if the Greenneck relishes asceticism. He likes
his iPod, so long as no one sneaks any Jack Johnson onto it. He likes
his five pair of skis, his trio of bicycles, his truck and tractor and
chainsaw. But he sees the writing on the wall, and he’s slowing down.
Still buying stuff, but seeking that which is made to last. Holding
onto his aging laptop, molasses-slow and buggy as it is, for another
year. More often skiing the fields and forests around his home, rather
than making the drive to the mountain.

He’d rather not think of it as his “green awakening.” He’d
rather think of it as a deal struck with his future: Learning now how
we’ll all live then. Maybe it’s a bad deal; maybe “then” will never
come. But that seems like a bad bet, don’t you think?