Green Guilt

So I confess that I switched back to Lysol.  For months, I had been struggling with an eco-friendly biodegradable toilet cleaner by Seventh Generation, but the unfortunate line of grey scum in my loo just wouldn't go away.  Enter the bleach, exit the scum.  Problem solved, apart from the agent of doom environmental guilt of course.

Generally, I consider myself to be an averagely responsible consumer where it comes to the green lifestyle.  I recycle religiously.  I compost occasionally.  I own a vast number of shopping totes and reusable water bottles, and remember to take them with me at least 75% of the time.  But I'm pretty much over what the Wall Street Journal christened the Pampered Countertop of products...the Mrs Meyers, Method Home, Seventh Generation stuff which looks pretty and smells great but does a fairly lousy job of actually cleaning anything.  I mean the hand soap is fairly harmless.  But have you tried Mrs Meyer's Lemon Verbena shower cleaner?  You need a real cleaning product at hand to wipe off the streaks and cut through the limescale deposits.  So you end up cleaning twice!

It was such a relief to discover that I was not alone in my disdain for some of these products, and that folk around the country are having a hard time adapting to the filmy deposit which new eco dishwasher detergents leave on their glasses and dishes.  As one savvy consumer put it, if you have to wash the dishes again (either before or after they've been through the dishwasher), then surely the excess water consumption is nearly as environmentally unsound as the phosphates in the old sudsy detergents were in the first place?

The problem with my argument is of course, that while my little piece of pollution is just a drop in the world's mop and bucket, if you add all the other polluters, it suddenly becomes more serious.  And if you scale up my argument to a bigger issue, it just doesn't work at all.

Take, for example, uranium mining at the Grand Canyon.  Two years ago, the Secretary of the Interior placed a moratorium on new mining claims within 1 million acres around the Canyon.  But that period is about to expire, and public comment is sought  by April 4th as to which of four proposals the Bureau of Land Management should adopt with regards to mining in the vicinity of the Canyon.  Let's make this easy.  The Colorado river supplies drinking water to some 25 million Americans.  Uranium contaminated drinking water, anyone?  I don't think it's necessary to refer to recent events in Japan to make this point any clearer. 

Should you need any further convincing on this subject, then I encourage you to visit the Grand Canyon Trust's website, which has additional cogent reasons for supporting Alternative B (which would ban all new uranium mining claims within public land watersheds that drain directly into Grand Canyon National Park), and has convenient links to the relevant reports, as well as the e-mail address where you can comment.

Here endeth the lesson.  Because I know that the above two paragraphs sounded just a tad preachy.  Which is ironic, given where I started.  I guess I'm just a conflicted green contender - eager to tell others how to clean up their act, before I have my own house in order. 

Rafting the Canyon - Part 1

I turned both ankles at about mile 2 of the seven mile hike down the Bright Angel trail into Grand Canyon.  Eric had gone ahead, bent on a mission to see Phantom Ranch, so the helping hands that got me up again were those of relative strangers.  These were some of the people with whom we would spend the next 9 days on the Colorado river.

The pain as I stood up was intense.  But I was pretty sure that neither ankle had sprained, although thoughts about how I would cope getting on and off boats in the sometimes harsh environment of the Canyon over the next few days were scudding through my head as I reassured everyone that I was fine.  At the next rest stop, I gulped down a couple of ibuprofen, again proffered by one of my walking companions. And while I set no records, I was proud to be the first woman of the group down at the beach, despite the mishap.

There's nothing like a rafting trip for getting to know folk.  You eat, camp, raft and hike together.  You bathe in the river, drink from the river (the water goes through a filtration process) and you pee in the river.  It's surprising how quickly this becomes normal - although it would be less than the truth to say it ever becomes comfortable.  Private time is a non-existent concept.  If you don't like someone, it's hard to escape them entirely, given the group dynamic.  Your only option is to watch closely to see which boat they elect to travel in each morning, and pick another.

If this sounds like a recipe for disaster (or perhaps for a new sort of no-holds-barred reality TV show), then to some extent you have the right picture.  People of all ages, from different geographies, political backgrounds and religious perspectives are thrown into five boats eighteen feet long and have to make do.  Did I mention that it costs thousands of dollars to do this?

And yet it is a self-selecting group.  Everyone traveling on the trip we just took knew that they wanted to see America's most spectacular natural wonder.  For some, it was a new variety of outdoorsy vacation.  For others, an item to be checked off  their bucket list.  For most, whatever their original motivation in going, it became the trip of a lifetime as we ran rapids through nearly a billion years of geologic history.
 
The Canyon is also a great leveler.  Money, possessions and stuff don't mean much down there.  Helping unload the boat, lending someone an arm to climb over a rock and slicing up onions for dinner become far more important.  No-one is interested in your temperature controlled wine vault in an environment where a beer chilled by the river feels like the best thing you ever drank at the end of each day. 

That first evening, as my ankles swelled up to tennis ball size, I started to benefit from the shared knowledge of our new community.  The guides recommended "icing" my ankles in the 50 degree water of the Colorado.  An energy healer worked her magic on my right foot, which proceeded to heal at a rapid pace. (The left one is still swollen 10 days later).  And I took a dubious combo of ibuprofen and boxed red wine as a sleep aid.



Each year, some five million visitors marvel at a small portion of the Grand Canyon from the rim.  We were privileged to be part of the 25,000 or so who see the Canyon from the river.
I'm not sure if the supermom from Colorado, or the businessman from Georgia or the couple from Florida will ever return to raft Grand Canyon again.  But I know we will.  One of the guides on our trip put it succinctly: "I'm an addict" she said. 

There are worse vices.