Dark Green – the Extreme Eco Movement goes “Carborexic”

Am I Green?  Oh yeah.  Am I Dark Green?  Well, I guess that depends on what you consider Dark.  There are after all, different shades of Green.  Now there is a new kind of Dark Greeny, and it’s being called “Carborexic.”

Carborexism is a form of Carbon Anorexia, according to a recent New York Times article. “The term describes people so obsessed with shrinking their carbon footprint that they go to extremes, like saving all their trash for a year to demonstrate how much they actually consume, or making their children sleep huddled in the same bed to conserve heat.

My wife and I, while sitting around last night, almost went there. “Did you know,” I asked, “that some people actually use their dirty bath water to water their plants?” “Actually, that sound’s like a good idea.  I wish we had some type of Grey water tank so that we could do that,” she responded.  Yeah, we are definitely Green, perhaps even Dark Green.

But what are some of the things that makes a person Carborexic? According to psychiatrists (who probably live in McMansions and drive SUV’s) you may be Carborexic if you;

• Tend to wash plastic bags or even Zip-lock bags, and use them over and over
• Keep the thermostat set below 60 degrees in the winter, or turn off the heat all together and heat you’re home with a wood stove
• Occasionally relieve yourself outside to “save a flush”
• run you’re car on vegetable oil waste
• Unplug the refrigerator and store you’re food in an outdoor pantry in the cooler months
• Use a composting toilet

David Zucker, a sustainability specialist at Porter Novelli, a PR company which has studied America’s “dark greens”, said they were inordinately influential over other people’s behavior, and that the deepest dark greens, were “bordering on the fanatic.”

I mentioned in a previous article that turning off you’re computer at night and getting Carbon Fluorescent Light-bulbs does not make you an Environmentalist. Neither does Recycling. These are things that everyone should already be doing anyway. It actually upsets me a little bit when people talk about how how green they are because they turn down their heat at night, or purchase organic cotton shopping bags.  I mean, these are good things, but turning off the T.V and getting outside, along with recycling the knowledge that you learn about lowering you’re carbon footprint, makes everything else, second nature.

Kermit had it right when he said “It aint easy being green.”  We live in the Metro D.C. area, and there isn’t a lot of land around for growing large gardens, or doing a lot of the things that would make our lives even more green.  But we do what we can, which is a lot more than I thought possible a year ago.  And next year, we plan on doing even more.

So call it Dark Green, or call it Carborexic, I call it doing the right thing. I call it a lifestyle instead of a movement.  From now on, I’m calling myself Dark Green.

So my question to you, faithful reader, is this, “Is carborexia a mental condition or a noble way of living?”

As always, keep up the good fight and Alter the Eco!

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Photo courtesy of Pip Wilson via Creative Commons License

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