Earth Lover with double standards...

Wherever I look things seem to be going green. Well, maybe not Gurgaon so much unless you count the green glass that encases many building that are mushrooming in what used to be vast lands of shrubbery and a few trees before. But everything else.

Take this morning. I started the day going through the Obama inauguration press (I wasn’t given a choice to read much else by any of the newspapers this morning). It said that Al Gore, the maker of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’,will be amongst the key people influencing this government from the sidelines and that global environmental protection is going to be amongst the key focus areas of his term.

In office, the first thing I did was interview an engineer who claimed to have designed a green/hybrid car prototype a few years ago and subsequently won many national and international awards for that. This reference took about 25% space in his resume. A conversation on electric and hybrid cars took about 20% of the total time I spent with him in the interview. As I got back to my computer, there were two ‘green emails’ waiting for me amongst a host of others. One from Greenpeace and another on an internal BCG research on consumer behaviour w.r.t. green products in times of recession. (WHO thinks up this stuff!!!)

Being one of the first few members to join the environment club in school and getting an award from EPA, US for a science project I did in class VIII, it is easy for me to make myself believe I care about the environment. So, this overwhelming green-ification of everything around me made me feel happy, at peace with myself. The world was moving in the right direction. Our kids may have a planet to live on after all.

I imagined a world with a green index for everything. ‘How Green are you?’ it would boldly ask and quickly measure. For a car company, what % of their cars sold are electric or hybrid? For a manufacturing company – do they use bio-degradable materials? Publishing houses will try to run on recycled paper alone. Office buildings will have solar panels for a large chunk of their energy needs and restaurants will only use organic food and charge prices that one may need to sell an organ for to buy.

But wait, on this green index that I plan to devise and promote, how green am I? On a scale of 1-10, would I be an 8 or a 9?

Unfortunately the answer is sad and scary. Some of the facts: we own 3 cars for a sum total of 2 people in the house and never wait more than 5 minutes for each other to share a car to our respective works that are 100m apart. We may talk about buying a hybrid but we know that we will drive it speeds and RPMs that won’t tax the battery too much. We have immense pride in our house and believe that using multiple low voltage bulbs in the house and keeping them all on at all times, makes the house look prettier. To be honest, it actually does, but that is not the point. We don’t attempt to recycle anything but newspaper – which is also an assumption – given that the maid takes it all once a month and who knows what she does with it. Separating trash into biodegradable, recyclable and others is a far cry!!

I can go on… but my scorecard does not have negatives.

So, does reading news, talking and thinking about environment protection and climate change make me an Earth lover? Does donating Rs.100/month to Greenpeace get me there?

Let me first go and turn off those little lights…