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"  &amp;quot;I was born a poor black child.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s a line from The Jerk that&amp;#039;s always resonated with me, mostly because I was born a poor black child. And I hated being poor. I&amp;#039;m sure my grandmother Lorraine (aka Nana) did too, but she was good at making do with what she had. She raised me in the South Bronx on food stamps, government cheese, and an immense amount of love. I owe everything to her. Some of the things she taught me growing up clicked immediately: the importance of an education, of being a self-reliant woman, of believing that you can achieve anything you put your mind to. Those lessons served me well. I got a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster boarding school in Connecticut. I went on to Yale. And then yada, yada, yada, here I am, at 35, a successful working actress with a great husband, a sweet California mid-century ranch house in Glendale (with trees, my own trees, two Avatar-size 100-year-old oaks), and a cute rescue pit mix. I&amp;#039;ve managed to have some influence in the development of Jasmine, whom I play on NBC&amp;#039;s Parenthood, to help create a black female character not based on stereotypes (rarer than we&amp;#039;d like to think). Good thing I wasn&amp;#039;t too hardheaded to heed my grandmother. Don&amp;#039;t even want to think about where I would be if I hadn&amp;#039;t. But some lessons took longer to penetrate through my wax-filled ears. With all this talk of Going Green, Buying Green, Living Green, and Green being the new whatever, I&amp;#039;ve come to realize that, although we had no green, my grandmother was actually the &amp;quot;greenest&amp;quot; person I&amp;#039;ve ever known. Nana never spoke about protecting the environment or energy independence. She never brought up pollution or deforestation or toxic waste dumps. Instead, she harangued us to &amp;quot;waste not, want not,&amp;quot; which is basically the original version of &amp;quot;reduce, reuse, recycle,&amp;quot; the three R&amp;#039;s that have since been hammered into all of our heads. For Nana, it wasn&amp;#039;t about saving the planet\u2014it was about saving money. &amp;quot;Turn those lights off and use God&amp;#039;s light\u2014we&amp;#039;re not related to Con Ed!&amp;quot; she&amp;#039;d always holler when the lights were left on or used during the day in our two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a housing project. I didn&amp;#039;t see what the big deal was. It&amp;#039;s just a light. Who cared if it was on while I was in the other room? Of course, when you&amp;#039;re not the one on a super-tightly fixed income paying the bills and putting food on the table, your priorities are different. I would grudgingly comply, wondering: What if we were related to Con Edison? Could I do what I wanted then? She&amp;#039;d have me return empty bottles and cans to the local bodega for the refund. After a while it would add up to a few dollars, which I could keep and spend on candy, pizza, and the arcade. Nice when I got the money, but a pain in the ass to lug a big garbage bag down the street. It&amp;#039;s like I was carrying a sign that said: &amp;quot;Hey! We&amp;#039;re broke!&amp;quot; Interesting that I tripped out on being broke in an environment where no one had money. But since I didn&amp;#039;t see many kids my age doing it\u2014although I&amp;#039;m sure they were\u2014I felt like I was the only one. We saved every plastic and paper grocery bag. I don&amp;#039;t recall reusing them at the supermarket, but they always came in handy for something: trash bags, cat-box liners, my secret stash of discarded Brussels sprouts. The worst was when I had to use them as textbook covers. Seemed like everyone else got the cool, shiny ones. I had brown paper bags over my books. I hated it. I wanted to be like the rest of the class. Only now can I appreciate the clean simplicity of a brown paper book cover. Who wants to be like everybody else? Two-liter soda bottles used to have black plastic bottoms. Nana would remove that part to use as plant pots, as they had small holes that allowed for good drainage. I always wondered how she saw that potential in a soda bottle. She had a green thumb. (I have the black thumb of death. I can barely keep an aloe plant alive\u2014and those things are hard to kill.) Her plants made our Section 8\u2013funded apartment feel homey and warm, in spite of the burned-out buildings nearby\u2014a feature of the Bronx in the &amp;#039;70s, because slumlords torched them for the insurance money. Nana saved cooking grease and oil. Empty margarine containers became &amp;quot;Tupperware&amp;quot;\u2014and God help you if she spotted one in the trash. As bars of soap whittled down, Nana added the remnants to a jar with a little water. When funds got really, really low, she used the mixture in place of laundry detergent or dishwashing liquid. Even toilet paper could incite her wrath. &amp;quot;What, you got teeth on your ass?&amp;quot; she&amp;#039;d yell at me after a trip to the bathroom. &amp;quot;Stop using so much goddamn toilet paper!&amp;quot; Now all that makes perfect sense. But at the time it was a constant reminder of what we didn&amp;#039;t have. Not to mention that while attending boarding school and Yale with some of the country&amp;#039;s richest kids, I was tired of being the one always not having. My reason for going to an Ivy was to someday makes lots of money so that Nana and I would never have to want for anything. But when she died halfway through my freshman year, I lost the drive to stay there.          The path to sustainability: The 18-year-old author with her beloved grandmother in 1992; followed by her &amp;quot;flossy&amp;quot; period, circa 2002; and in 2011, a composting, hybrid-driving Joy An opportunity to model arrived right when I needed an escape plan. I took a chance and jumped ship. Maybe I could make a living while figuring out my life, which up to that point had been focused on relentless studying, high-achievement hobbies (dance, music), and finding the next scholarship opportunity. Within two years, I hurtled up a few income brackets and was making more money than I&amp;#039;d ever seen. Not that I knew what to do with it. Well, I had an inkling: follow Nana&amp;#039;s example by saving. But of course I didn&amp;#039;t do that. I was rich, bitch! I didn&amp;#039;t have to penny-pinch anymore. I pretty much threw everything Nana taught me about frugality and wastefulness right out the window as soon as I got my own place in Manhattan. I wouldn&amp;#039;t be caught dead returning bottles for a refund. I didn&amp;#039;t need that chump change anymore. I&amp;#039;d leave on every switch, day or night, in my apartment just because I could. Screw God&amp;#039;s light! And I used a lot of toilet paper. The more money I made, the more wasteful I became. I was super flossy. Not that there&amp;#039;s anything wrong with being flossy if that&amp;#039;s how you roll. But for me, it was related to my self-esteem more than my style. I could afford to look as &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; as I had always wanted, and that made me cool. Nana had only been able to buy me a few pairs of shoes at a time and a less than impressive wardrobe. Now I had a closet full of shoes stuffed in a closet full of clothes. I could wear that blinged-out watch even though I couldn&amp;#039;t tell a real diamond from a cubic zirconia. And I was pushing that huge SUV with 23-inch rims just to be fly, even though I knew nothing about rims. Yay, I was hot shit. And it felt...great? In a little over 10 years, I&amp;#039;d swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. Thankfully, the pendulum started slowing down. A bunch of things woke me up. I realized I needed to stop fronting. In the middle of trying to sort myself out, Nana&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;conservation techniques&amp;quot; came rushing back to me. It was a few summers ago. I was at a women&amp;#039;s surf-and-yoga retreat in Bali. Over a lunch of fresh fish, tempeh, roasted vegetables, and coconut water prepared by two wonderful Indonesian women who cooked more food for us in a day than they probably made for themselves in a week, a few of my fellow vacationers began discussing global warming. They threw around numbers and figures that meant little to me, but I surprised myself by getting heated, and, well, political. &amp;quot;The truth is that we&amp;#039;ve raped and pillaged this planet enough,&amp;quot; I told these women, who seemed as shocked by my candor as I was. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve been wasteful and disrespectful.&amp;quot; I recalled watching the late, great Kurt Vonnegut on Real Time With Bill Maher musing that &amp;quot;the earth&amp;#039;s immune system is trying to get rid of us.... We are a disease on the face of this planet.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s when I thought about my Nana. She wasn&amp;#039;t trying to be the Earth Warrior Princess. She was mindful out of economic necessity. Because of the pennies she saved, I was able to go to the circus every time it came to town, and have chocolate malt on our annual visit to Coney Island, and see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. She scrimped and saved to give me experiences that I&amp;#039;ll never forget, and forged for me, out of sad circumstances and loss, a hard but at times even golden childhood. That mindfulness\u2014call it frugality or environmental consciousness, whichever you choose, whether you&amp;#039;re of affluent or of humble means\u2014is what&amp;#039;s important. Perhaps if people could remember that, the environment, the world, and its citizens would be in a better state. As for me, I gave the rims away and leased a hybrid. I amassed my own collection of &amp;quot;Tupperware.&amp;quot; I buy only recycled toilet paper. I even compost, among other things. None of that makes me a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, but it&amp;#039;s a start. Perhaps most significant, I&amp;#039;ve pulled all the teeth out of my ass to make it easier to get my head out of there. And I use God&amp;#039;s light every chance I get. I think Nana would be proud. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a11683/joy-bryant-sustainable-living/>