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"  It&amp;#039;s funny\u2014as in, it&amp;#039;s not actually that funny\u2014how you can look back on a time in your life when you felt good, even great, and realize that you were slightly out of your mind. For me, this is true of just about every period (which naturally makes me wonder what I&amp;#039;ll see when I look back on now), but the time I want to tell about is my late twenties, because even though it was a deeply passionate and pure time for me, it was also one of my most fanatical. And what I was fanatical about was &amp;quot;treading lightly on the earth.&amp;quot; That phrase is (happily) ubiquitous now, but back then\u2014the tail end of the Live Large &amp;#039;80s\u2014it came to me like fresh wisdom via a bitter and brilliant writing professor, and it seemed as novel, revolutionary, and crucial as anything I&amp;#039;d ever heard.  No doubt this was at least partly because the concept gibed perfectly with the sparse existence I sought at that time, helped along by the fact that I had little money to live any other way. I&amp;#039;d quit my New York editing job to attend graduate school in Tucson, where tuition was free, space abundant, and cost of living a fraction of what it was in Manhattan. On leaving, I had shed my possessions like a child peels winter clothes on the first warm spring day, giving up everything from my closet full of sweaters and heels to my Jennifer sofa bed. Afterward, my entire life consisted of the contents of my newly purchased (used) CJ-7 Jeep: cat, computer, a bagful of T-shirts and jeans, and two or three little black skirts that would become the reminder of my former New York existence. And when I got to Arizona nine days later\u2014along the way also, if unintentionally, discarding the pounds of muscle I&amp;#039;d acquired through years of hard gym workouts\u2014I wanted to keep it that way; wanted, as I hiked quietly through the desert searching for the meaning of life, to keep myself, my &amp;quot;stuff,&amp;quot; my consumption whittled down to a shard.  It&amp;#039;s not that I&amp;#039;d been some shopaholic pack rat; it&amp;#039;s more that I&amp;#039;d had the accoutrements of a 1980s urban twentysomething working woman&amp;#039;s life, from the products (hair, face, nails) and the meal plan (eat a lot, exercise a lot) to the material mentality (if it&amp;#039;s out there, it&amp;#039;s mine for the taking if I somehow earn the funds to buy it). In Arizona, by contrast, I bought the bare minimum to subsist on: a few thrift shop plates and pans; a door and two sawhorses for a desk; two pairs of faded-almost-white denim shorts; and a couple of second-hand tie-dye dresses. For three years, I didn&amp;#039;t buy an item of makeup (including sunscreen, for which I could kill myself now). My bed was a mattress on a secondhand box spring, my night table a salvaged milk crate. At one drop per dish, my bottle of environmentally friendly dish detergent lasted more than a year.  I walked or biked nearly everywhere, including to the grocery store, pedaling home with my purchases in my backpack and hanging from my handlebars in reused, brought-from-home plastic bags. (This was before the only environmentally correct shopping bag was a reusable cloth one.) When I washed clothes\u2014in cold water only, of course, sometimes skipping soap altogether\u2014I hung them out on a line, reading Edward Abbey or Charles Bowden in the sun as they dried. Life was sparse, simple, cheap; I reveled in quiet lightness and autonomy. What happened, of course, is that eventually my spartan, eco-conscious existence became a spartan, eco-conscious obsession\u2014no surprise, given my type A, perfectionistic, sometimes neurotic personality. (&amp;quot;Why do you always have to analyze everything?&amp;quot; my sisters plead.) It&amp;#039;s the same personality that earned me 4.0s and a Phi Beta Kappa key in college that in my earlier twenties had me running through Central Park in the middle of the night to get my miles in: the personality that doesn&amp;#039;t easily allow for not doing something all the way and absolutely right. In Arizona\u2014where it was too hot to run anyway\u2014my obsessive gene fixed on its new goal of treading lightly. And soon, what had been a pure, simple, graduate-school life turned into something a little more, well, over-the-top.  I created a &amp;quot;compost heap,&amp;quot; which transformed the lovely little front-yard garden I&amp;#039;d planted in the tiny patch of viable dirt\u2014pale orange and cherry snapdragons, crimson and butterscotch pansies\u2014into an eyesore of eggshells, coffee grounds, and banana peels that, given the lack of rainfall, would likely take years to degrade. Once I began, I couldn&amp;#039;t throw away one single compostable thing anymore\u2014even if, to my landlord&amp;#039;s horror, they just formed a trash heap in the middle of my (his) yard.  I&amp;#039;d bought a box of Ziploc bags on my arrival in Tucson, and I think now that I was determined to make it last my entire three years there. On any given day, you&amp;#039;d find several haggard washed-out bags, aging wrinkled shells of their former creamy selves, drying inside out on my kitchen counter. I carried food from place to place in those bags, loath to either waste anything or consume more than I &amp;quot;needed.&amp;quot; Dinner was a slice of pizza or a frozen yogurt, eaten with a plastic spoon I kept in my purse, because really, why use a new one and then throw it away? Afterward, I would gather the clean napkins left on tables in the student center and put them back on the dispenser, or take them home to use myself in lieu of the paper towels I no longer purchased...anything so they wouldn&amp;#039;t go to waste.  I must have been quite the sight for the pumped-up, flaxen-haired, teenage gods and goddesses who formed much of the student body at U of A, me scurrying dark and tiny and angsty to pick up abandoned Snapple bottles while they tossed Frisbees or lay on the grassy quad in the sun, muscled midriffs displayed, vaguely doing homework but really fantasizing about each other as they sipped their Big Gulps. I figured they considered me a wackjob, enviro-hippie grad student, but I didn&amp;#039;t care; I didn&amp;#039;t envy them, any more than an emaciated anorexic envies her healthy, pizza-loving roommate, because I knew I was virtuous and noble and responsible. I was saving the world, or at least trying to. The problem, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan neatly put it, is that &amp;quot;to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.&amp;quot;  So it does. Soon enough, in my efforts to waste nothing\u2014paper, water, food, clothing, fuel\u2014I began to despise anything &amp;quot;superfluous,&amp;quot; from a smell (perfume was unbearable) to a plastic lid placed on a polystyrene cup of something I wasn&amp;#039;t carrying far (and why polystyrene in the first place, when it wasn&amp;#039;t recyclable on campus and didn&amp;#039;t biodegrade?). I wrote a short story called &amp;quot;Leftovers&amp;quot; about the greenhouse effect\u2014before every first grader knew about global warming, before polar ice caps were melting (or at least before most of us were aware of it), and before items like organic hemp trousers and jackets made from recycled soda bottles were the fashion statement of the day\u2014and got it published in a popular national magazine. Like the Andie MacDowell character in Steven Soderbergh&amp;#039;s groundbreaking 1989 film Sex, Lies and Videotape, I could not stop thinking about garbage, landfills, floating barges of waste. My boyfriend, Dan, gave me a gift, a little clay owl with big eyes to &amp;quot;watch over me&amp;quot; when he wasn&amp;#039;t there, and with a pang of sadness, I thanked him but said he should please not give me any more &amp;quot;things.&amp;quot; Holidays\u2014especially Christmas\u2014I saw as nothing but material manifestations of evil corporations, and the idea of buying stuff, wrapping stuff, mailing stuff in boxes, being given stuff myself, filled me with anguish and dread. Dan and I got married (he found it all charming and interesting, somehow), an East Coast country-club wedding requested and funded by my parents that I didn&amp;#039;t want and couldn&amp;#039;t embrace. I responded to what I considered the excess of the occasion\u2014pretty fresh-cut flowers on the tables, a lovely dress I&amp;#039;d likely wear only once\u2014by starving my already thin body further down. Advancement, technology\u2014really, human progress of any kind, unless it was related to recycling or saving the planet\u2014just depressed me. It was as if I could feel the world speeding by around me, faster and faster, consuming and devouring itself, eating up its resources, producing crap as fast as people could buy it and hurl it in the landfill. Things simply could not go on this way\u2014was I the only one who saw this? It made me want to sit alone and still in a very dark room, doing nothing, using nothing, adjusting my very breathing to conserve oxygen and energy.  If you were going to be obsessed with the environment in 1990, Tucson was a great place to be. As in much of the West, there was an awareness and sensibility there about the land\u2014no doubt inspired by its beauty and accessibility, not to mention the lack of rainfall and water\u2014that was harder to find back East. But eventually I had to come back to New York City; my work was there, along with my friends, plus my husband wanted to give it a shot. And New York, that land of overheated and over-air-conditioned buildings, of massive meat sandwiches and laptop-size slices of pizza, of &amp;quot;Would you like a bag with your bag?&amp;quot;\u2014New York was a different story.  Never mind that urban living is infinitely greener than other kinds, what with walking everywhere and residing in small apartments that insulate one another. At market after market, I&amp;#039;d hear someone order an egg and cheese on a roll and a coffee and watch the cashier put the plastic-lidded cup in a paper bag with four or five sugars and creams, a stirrer, and a wad of napkins, then put that bag into another bag with the sandwich (which was wrapped in both foil and wax paper), salt and pepper packets, a plastic knife, and another napkin stack. Often, the busy recipient accepted the bag and, without breaking pace, extracted the roll and the coffee and dumped the rest into the trash bin just outside the store\u2014or, more accurately, next to the bin, overflowing as it was with foil, salad containers, full packets of Kikkoman and Hellmann&amp;#039;s, and ever more clean napkins, whole trees&amp;#039; worth, it seemed. I couldn&amp;#039;t stop watching. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t need a bag,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d say, having purchased something already plastic-wrapped, and the cashier, ever efficient, never listening, would hand me one anyway. &amp;quot;No ketchup, thanks,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d say, and return to my temp job desk to find seven foil Heinz packets stuffed in with my fries. I had a drawer full of take-out condiments no one would ever use, because I couldn&amp;#039;t throw them away. Occasionally, I would think: What&amp;#039;s wrong with me? But then I&amp;#039;d think, No: What&amp;#039;s wrong with everyone else?  How, then, did I get over this fixation, these thoughts and actions that consumed my time, mind, and energy? Well. As I&amp;#039;ve intimated, we obsessive types never really &amp;quot;get over&amp;quot; our obsessions; we only shift them from one thing to another, or bury them in the plots of our minds to resurface in another decade. I got pregnant\u2014because as much as I hated adding a person to the planet, I was 31 and wanted a baby\u2014and for months I felt so sick that washing out Ziplocs and contemplating landfills just wasn&amp;#039;t an option. There were doctors to visit, baby books to read, a crib (used, if possible) to be procured. I also had a job\u2014I wrote advice for a teen magazine, and I had a novel coming out by then, with a second under contract\u2014so whenever I wasn&amp;#039;t preparing for the baby (or curled in a ball of nausea), I was either attempting to write or advising young women on the minefields of love and friendship and parents who wouldn&amp;#039;t set them free. It&amp;#039;s not that I didn&amp;#039;t still think about global warming; it&amp;#039;s not that I didn&amp;#039;t still try to tread lightly. It&amp;#039;s just that these thoughts were forced aside in my brain, finally, to let something else in. And then I had the baby, and as someone once said to me, &amp;quot;The only thing sweeter than idealism is the freedom gained after your ideals have been shattered.&amp;quot; Once you&amp;#039;re chucking eight or 10 dirty diapers a day into the landfill, you might as well dismount your high horse. And yes, I considered cloth diapers, but the space factor (housing, washing, and drying them in our New York apartment), the time-suck factor, and the water pollution factor held me back. So I bought the Huggies and I diapered my baby, and after she&amp;#039;d soiled the portable plastic butt-huggers, I tossed them\u2014voila\u2014into the trash, just like all the other city mothers I knew except for one (who, I thought happily, was way more neurotic than I). I still felt bad about it\u2014especially knowing, as I did, that America, with 5 percent of the people on earth, produces a third of all the world&amp;#039;s garbage\u2014but I didn&amp;#039;t let it overwhelm me with guilt. Later, when that baby was long out of diapers, I would teach her to fight he good fight. But in the meantime, I would not let guilt overwhelm the joy, the miracle of life that I was experiencing.  That baby turned 13 last week, and though I like to think that, so far, we&amp;#039;re more or less on target with both the teaching and the joy, I&amp;#039;m still in no way &amp;quot;cured&amp;quot; of my environmental obsession. It&amp;#039;s just that, in this aspect of life, as in others, I try to find a happy medium: that middle way between living an irresponsible, resource-gobbling existence, and living with constant and debilitating preoccupation with waste and global warming. For a long time, this actually wasn&amp;#039;t terribly hard; life was so busy that it frankly left little room for fixating on anything\u2014or, more accurately, I channeled that energy into staying on top of groceries, e-mail, laundry, and four people&amp;#039;s social calendars, all without losing my job, not to mention my mind. If that sounds trite, it&amp;#039;s also true: Going, going, going before collapsing in a heap of exhaustion at night (I&amp;#039;ll just say it: mania) is a great way to ward off much thought.  Lately, though, it&amp;#039;s become harder not to think about the environment overmuch, now that the rest of the country seems to have caught up with my once-obsession. Everywhere I go, especially living in an eco-friendly college town as I now do, I am urged to consume less, recycle more, help save the planet. This is good, of course\u2014I&amp;#039;m thrilled to have others help me fish bottles out of garbage cans, to see bike-pulled trash collection on my block and greener options at my grocery store\u2014but, like giving an anorexic a job at Weight Watchers, it can be a challenge to not let it drag me back into the trenches. Noble or not, I don&amp;#039;t want to have to think about the carbon footprint of every morsel I eat, to look at every gift I receive as one more thing for the landfill. I don&amp;#039;t want to be Green-orexia Girl, like the friend of a friend who got so freaked out about toxic chemicals in plastic that she moved every plastic item from her house into the garage, where they now sit until she can find a way to recycle them.  &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re not outraged, you&amp;#039;re not paying attention,&amp;quot; rant the bumper stickers in my town, and certainly rage is easy enough, with SUVs blowing by and cell phone companies luring customers into buying new, even higher-tech phones when there&amp;#039;s not a thing wrong with the old ones. But I want to pay attention without being outraged, thank you.  Sometimes, I admit, in order to do this I have to act more cavalier than I feel, to essentially try to pull one over on myself. Straightening the fridge, I&amp;#039;ll hurl the ancient take-out containers of sour cream and guacamole into the garbage in a big cleaning frenzy, only to come back an hour later and dig them all out, scrubbing my way to penance before placing them in the recycling bin. But then, I have managed not to obsess about how to make my aging Volvo into a grease car (the ones that run on leftover food-grade vegetable oil--if you suddenly smell french fries on the highway, you&amp;#039;re probably passing one), helped by the fact that you actually need a diesel engine. But that&amp;#039;s part of my point. Some of it, some of getting over any obsession, is about simply forcing yourself to be rational rather than idealistic. To remind yourself, again and again if need be, that humans are neither designed nor supposed to be perfect, and any attempt to be so almost always sucks the joy out of life. That doesn&amp;#039;t mean we get to ruin the planet, of course, and we all know by now that we (oops!) forgot that for a few decades there, and it&amp;#039;s time to make things right again. But while we try, I can still watch my kid fold a paper airplane and fly it, I can still take the occasional bite of a very red fruit, I can turn up the heat a degree so I&amp;#039;m not shivering, as long as I&amp;#039;m grateful for all of it. If I&amp;#039;m not doing my absolute best, I tell myself, it&amp;#039;s a more human close-enough. I just have to remember to turn the heat back down and recycle the airplanes at the end of the day. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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