I was just reading the New York Times magazine and I saw a little blurb about “environmentally friendly interior design.” They quoted the immortal three R’s of environmental responsibility: “recycle, reuse, reclaim”. Wait a minute… something isn’t quite right there… Isn’t supposed to be “reduce, reuse, recycle”? I guess its hard for advertisers to mention at all that people should consume less. Ok, this is a “special advertising section”, but for me this highlights the problem with so many self-proclaimed environmentalists. I grew up in Palo Alto, CA, a very liberal, highly educated, and growing ever more affluent town in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Environmentalism is very popular there, people eat organic food diligently, buy fair trade goods, drive hybrids, etc. All the markers of being a good environmentalist. But does this really add up to reducing impact on the environment?

There is a very good reason why “reduce” is the first of the 3 R’s. Reusing and recycling decrease the impact, eliminating the activity altogether eliminates the impact all together. Many people think the 3 R’s apply only to garbage, but that is only part of the equation. What is more important is that we reduce consumption. Few self-proclaimed environmentalists really want to hear that. They don’t want to give up the organic produce flown in from the southern Hemisphere during the off-season, the myriad appliances, the latest hybrid SUV, the vacations all over the planet, the iPod, the new mobile device every year, and so on and so forth.

Perhaps these icons of environmentalism are really salves to assuage guilt of those who are consuming much more their share, and are smart enough to know it. One thing that is iconic to me is the large collection of plastic bags that any self-respecting environmentalist has beneath their kitchen sink. All of these bags are, of course, a travesty upon the environment and we need to reuse them, they never should be thrown away. But sadly, there seems to be not so many uses for them, or its just too easy to forget and not bring them back to the grocery store to be reused. So they pile up underneath the sink.

I was just standing in line in a haven of environmentalism, the Park Slope Food Coop, with backpack on so I wouldn’t have to gather still more plastic bags in my kitchen. I saw a strange device which turned out to be a plastic bag drying rack for those so dedicated that they indeed wash their plastic bags to reuse them, presumably again and again. This got me thinking about how effective is it really to reuse these bags. To take a rough measure of the impact, I chose to think about the amount of oil involved. Plastic bags are made of oil, and oil is used to generate the energy to make them, so its safe to say that most of the cost of those bags is probably the cost of the oil. One of those supermarket bags costs roughly 1 cent, to be generous.

Now consider that the vast majority of Americans will drive to the grocery store, many people even drive to the Park Slope Food Coop. Now let’s say you live close to your grocery store, 5 miles roundtrip, and as a good environmentalist, you drive a hybrid. In the real world, hybrids get 35MPG at best. At $2.70/gallon, what gas is at in New York right now, you’ve just spent 39 cents on gas. That equals 39 plastic bags. Now consider all those people in SUVs getting 15 MPG (that’s being generous), their trip equals 90 plastics bags. This is not even including the costs of buying and maintaining the car. It looks more like the car is what we should be talking about, not the plastic bags.

It has been experiences like these that made me start thinking about measures of environmental impact. In an very general way, I think that you can measure your environmental impact by the amount of money that you spend and how much money you earn. Money is quite simply a measure of human effort. And if you are earning lots of money, that means that many people are exerting in order to pay your wages. The amount of money you spend is quite obviously related to the amount that you consume. Of course there are some things that scuttle this logic. For example, organic food mostly likely has a lesser impact that non-organic food, and it costs more money. So that example shows where spending more money means a lower impact.

But when it comes down to it, if you look at what people consume, then you can get a very good idea of their environmental impact. Low income people are often deemed bad environmentalists because they rarely buy organic food, drive beat up cars, throw trash around, etc. But if you look at what is actually being consumed, it becomes quite obvious that the upper middle class, organic environmentalists are really responsible for a much larger impact. For example, residents of New York City has been recently found to have a lower average environmental impact that the average American. It might seem obvious that this is because of the all the educated, organic-eating environmentalists, or because the majority of New Yorkers don’t own a car. I am sure this is a factor, but I think a perhaps more important statistic, and one that is almost always overlooked in such discussions, is the fact that New York has about an 20-21% poverty rate. The national average is 12-13%. So perhaps someone should study this relationship too. But my guess is most educated, environmentalists don’t want to hear the answer: we all need to reduce our consumption.