Unplugged and Unglued

• Mom, Will this Chicken Give Me Man Boobs?
• Robyn Harding
• Greystone Books (2009)

[Editor's note: When author Robyn Harding's family moved to Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood, she felt the pressure to live an eco-virtuous life, and kept notes.Mom, Will this Chicken Give Me Man Boobs?is her funny account of trying to raise a green family without going crazy. Here's a (mostly organic) taste from her book.]

And then a new Costco opened up in nearby Yaletown. My neighbor told me about it. "A huge jar of organic peanut butter is only five bucks," she said.

That alone was worth the price of membership. We ate a lot of peanut butter. Valerie Green had told me that peanuts soak up pesticides and also create some kind of weird mold (her kids only ate almond butter). But we loved peanut butter. And organic peanut butter must be okay, right? But at the natural food store, even a small jar was five dollars. We had to become Costco members.

My green guilt was tingling a little as we drove down to the massive warehouse. An enormous wholesale store didn't feel very environmentally friendly. We were supposed to be consuming less, weren't we? But buying in bulk did cut down on packaging. It made sense to buy one enormous jar of peanut butter instead of five smaller ones. I just had to control my buying behavior.

But as soon as I walked through those gaping doors, something happened to me. I turned into a megaconsumer. I didn't care about buying green and buying less. Everything was so cheap! I ran down the aisles like a hyperactive kid in a candy store.

"I don't really need nine deodorant sticks, but it's such a good deal!"

"If I buy a case of mustard now, I won't need to buy more until 2011!"

"A box of 400 tampons should get me through to menopause!"

The shopping list I'd painstakingly made sat neglected in my pocket. I wasn't going to limit myself. I needed that gallon jar of artichoke hearts. And a three-pack of lounge pants! How had I lived so long without a pair of lounge pants? Obviously I needed three of them. When we got to the till, our bill came to over $300.

Negotiating toilet paper

The temporary high of accumulation soon gave way to megaconsumer's remorse. There I was, trying to green my home, and I'd just spent $300 on toothpaste and mustard and lounge pants that I didn't really need. I had to do something to make up for my overconsumption.

"Let's only use recycled paper products from now on," I said to my husband. I had been reading Laurie David's book Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You! It said that if every household in America replaced just one roll of regular toilet paper with recycled toilet paper, they would save 424,000 trees.

"Sure," he agreed.

The next time I went shopping, I bought an eight-pack of recycled toilet paper. Maybe I was only saving half a tree with this purchase, but over the course of our family's butt-wiping lifetime, it was sure to add up. I felt really good about it, until I got a rash.

Yes, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I feel consumers should be warned. Recycled toilet paper gave me a rash. And what a bad place to get a rash! I had to stop using the stuff right then and there. Maybe I have an extra-sensitive bottom, but I was in agony. I wanted to save trees, I really did. But I wasn't going to walk around scratching my ass every five minutes.

"Okay, so from now on we'll use super-soft toilet paper, but recycled paper towel and tissues," I explained to John.

"Got it," he said. But he hadn't got it. He went grocery shopping and came home with two eight-packs of regular tissues.

"This isn't recycled," I said, looking at the eight boxes wrapped in plastic.

"It was on sale."

I looked closer. "This has lotion on it. That's even worse!"

"Why?" John asked.

"Uh..." I didn't know why but, in my annoyance, I felt compelled to make up a reason. "It's not real lotion. They use lotion chemicals. Those lotiony chemicals will soak into the soil when all this tissue ends up in a landfill."

"Okay," John said, "I'll remember to get recycled next time."

"Next time? We've got sixteen boxes of this stuff! Next time could be in a year!"

I knew John wanted to be green as much as I did. But for some reason, he didn't seem to suffer from the same sickening sense of guilt. Why was that? What was wrong with me?

My efficiently green friends

A few days later, I was chatting with my friend Trevor, who is very green. He and his partner were renovating their house using as many environmentally friendly measures as possible. They'd installed low-emissions, argon-filled, double-pane windows to keep UV rays out and heat in. An on-demand tankless water heater was much more energy-efficient than their old one. They'd ripped up and then re-laid their old floorboards after installing in-floor heating. And they'd torn out their inefficient fireplace and replaced it with an ultra-efficient woodstove. Unfortunately, renovating "green" was significantly more expensive than just plain renovating, and they'd soon exceeded their budget.

"It sucks that everything good for the environment is so damned expensive," I commiserated.

"I know," he agreed. "And apparently, if everyone in the world just unplugged all their appliances at night, we could basically stop global warming."

"What!?"

"Yeah," he explained, "Even when household appliances are off, they continue to draw energy. They're called energy vampires."

Bedtime, unplugged

My publisher had given me an advance copy of a British book called The Hot Topic (written by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King). Imagine my surprise when the authors mentioned the very same subject. The book said that devices left in "standby mode" cost the world a full one per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions -- nearly as much as the entire aviation industry!

Then, about a week later, Oprah did a show on easy ways to be green. Her environmental expert suggested we plug all appliances into a power bar and turn it off every night. I didn't need to be told three times. We were going to do it!

"John!" I cried. "We have to start unplugging everything!"

So John went into the basement storage room and found an old power bar. He connected our TV, VCR, DVD player, and stereo to this power strip, and we switched it off every night. I was also good about unplugging the toaster, coffeemaker, and my cell-phone charger. (I started leaving the microwave plugged in when I got tired of resetting the clock every morning.)

Now I just had to get everyone else in the world to do this, and we could stop worrying about all this eco-crap. We could fly guilt-free again. Take long, hot showers. Drive big cars! In Australia, all power outlets have an on-and-off switch. Why the hell don't we have that here?

I decided to mention my brilliant plan to stop global warming to a group of moms on the school playground one day.

"Nothing can stop global warming now," one of them said. "Sure, we can slow it down, but no matter what we do as the human race..."

"Stop!" I wanted to scream at her. "I just put in trickling showerheads and dim lightbulbs. I got an ass-crack rash from recycled toilet paper and you're telling me there's no hope? Don't be so depressing!" But what would that do to my reputation in the neighborhood? Instead, I just pasted on a smile and nodded along.

Related Tyee stories:

• Green Stud
  Excerpted: Almost Green: How I Built an Eco-Shed, Ditched My SUV, Alienated the In-Laws, and Changed My Life Forever by James Glave
• My Family's Escape from Plastic
  We chucked our handy snack-stashers. Are we eco-nuts?
• On Salt Spring, Playing with Death
  I just wanted to poke around nature with my toddler. Be careful what you wish for.