How I Became a Disillusioned Environmentalist
And why I worry that my efforts haven’t made any difference
I was an environmentalist before I knew what that word meant. Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not patting myself on the back. I only mean to say that I loved the earth even as a young child, and I saw that we were hurting it and wanted to stop that cycle of abuse.
By the time I was in middle school, I started getting pretty hardcore. I was in 8th grade when the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil into the Prince William Sound. My science teacher, a very young woman named Molly Brown, read us news stories about it every day, barely holding back her tears. At night, I went home and watched news footage of the wildlife stumbling around in the crude oil, in the last moments of their life.
Even now, as I write this, it brings tears to my eyes.
I couldn’t bear what we were doing to the planet. And why were so few people upset about it? Why wasn’t our government doing anything about it?
None of it made any sense to me.
Fast forward twenty years, and finally, “going green” became a thing. Finally, taking care of the earth seemed to be on the cultural radar — and not just that, but it was cool.
