Environmental Issue Hits Close to Home

Eventually, it happens to all of us married to those kind. You wake up before dawn in a sweat. It hits you. That soft drink you had after dinner. Tired and unthinking, you’d tossed the empty can in the trash.

The dilemma: Do you get up now and fish it out? Do you dare wait for the morning alarm and hope you make it to the kitchen before she does? Do you forget about it and take a chance that once, just this one time, she won’t find it? No. You get up now. Because you know she will find it.

My wife is one of those. An environmentalist. For nine years we’ve hauled paper and cardboard and bottles and cans and aluminum foil to recycling centers twice a month or more. We don’t just recycle our own stuff. We go on missions. We’re our neighbors’ keepers.

We’ve scraped knuckles reaching through chain-link fences to fetch soda or beer cans. We’ve risked poison ivy to clear them from bushes at local parks. We’ve tarried near bus stops to see if would-be riders planned to take their drinks and newspapers aboard or leave them on the bench. We’ve harassed our co-workers so much about recycling that some dread seeing us head their way.

She does it to help the environment. My reason is equally noble: to keep peace at home. I work for the ozone layer--or else.

Right now she’s upset that our closest neighbor in Anaheim is wasting too much of the nation’s water supply on his puny lawn. He does seem to think that good water grows on trees. But I feel for him. He is unaware that she’s planning her attack. I come home praying I don’t see all his topsoil dumped out in the street.

My biggest shock came a few months back, when I found a pile of fruit rinds and a rotted banana near the cactus in our back yard. And coffee grounds. Where had they come from? Then she told me. We now had a compost heap.

A compost heap?! How can a compost heap save the world?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Brian Erwin, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, says one-third of all trash collected from single-family homes is organic waste that could become good old lawn fertilizer.

One thing about environmentalists: Eventually, their habits are contagious. The other day I was almost struck by a car when I dashed into the street for a soda can. She didn’t make me. But doggone it, somebody had to get it. I can’t say I lose sleep yet when I see newspapers and bottles in office workers’ trash cans, with recycling bins just a few feet away. But it’s dawning on me how little effort it takes to do it right.

Environmentalists do have some strange ideas. My wife has it in her head that she--just one person--can make a difference. She actually believes that if millions and millions of just-one-persons took the environment more seriously, we could improve the planet for our children. She wants to teach our 7-year-old by example. For his generation, she believes, it may be the ultimate crisis.

Recently, someone left a message for my wife saying that she has raised the consciousness of many in her office. It made me realize: Struggle that it’s been, she’s finally getting that job done at home too.