Barriers to sustainability

First, I apologize for going so long without posting. Actual paying writing gigs have been popping up and they have to take priority, as I’m sure you understand.

But on to the topic at hand: sustainability. As the T-shirt says: the hippies were right all along. The way we live in the so-called “first world” simply can’t continue – the earth and its resources are finite. So, change is in order.

Recently, lots of resources have sprung up to help people make small changes in the direction of greater sustainability and a smaller environmental impact. Of course, this leaves out the fact that we, collectively, need to make some really big changes – the kind that can only happen with governmental regulation, incentives and other programs. Easier to recycle your beer cans than convince the federal government to subsidize alternative energy.

But that’s another post altogether. What I’m talking about here are the barriers to even the little green changes. The single most insurmountable barrier I face: ignorant landlords. Examples:

In most households, the clothes dryer is the single biggest electricity hog. There’s a very simple, low-tech solution: put up a clothesline in the back yard. Yet, many of the landlords I’ve rented from over the years (though not all) forbade putting up a clothesline on the grounds that “it looks ugly.”

Composting dramatically reduces the amount of solid waste going to landfills. Not surprisingly, none of my landlords have been OK with a tenant “piling up garbage in the backyard,” no matter how contained the compost bin is.

The fuel used to transport food to our grocery stores creates a huge carbon footprint. Plus, when fuel prices go up, the price of the food transported with that fuel goes up as well (as our recent experience shows). A “Victory Garden” is an excellent way to provide healthy, fresh produce for yourself and your family, reduce your carbon footprint, and even get some good exercise. But many of my landlords (including my current one) haven’t allowed anything but grass to be grown in the yard – some even forbade containers! The reason? “It’s too hard for the lawn-maintenance crew to mow around beds or containers.”

In my state, Arkansas, tenants have virtually no rights whatsoever (link to my recent article coming soon). It’s going to be an uphill battle to get even basic rights, let alone allowances for sustainable lifestyle options. This is one of the few issues I’m pretty pessimistic about.

The gender of nonfiction

Last fall, Ira Glass, host of NPR’s “This American Life,” released a book canonizing the great nonfiction writers of our age. Its title? The Kings of Nonfiction. Really – and as Anne Trubek notes in her Chronicle article, only two of the 14 authors Glass includes are women. What’s even worse is that, according to Trubek, not one critic has taken him to task for this blatantly sexist title and/or bias.

This type of thing is certainly nothing new – the entire field of Western literature has been heavily weighted in favor of men for centuries. What got me thinking about this genre in particular is that it’s happened before.

Glass writes that he believes we live in a “golden age” of nonfiction writing. He chose the pieces he did based on some fairly vague criteria, one of which was that each piece had to include some actual reporting, as opposed to just essays. He wanted them to be entertaining, and includes writers who jumped into the story, AP style be damned. Trubek points out the direct lineage between Glass’ subjects and the New Journalism that emerged in the 1960s, and then the New New Journalism of Robert S. Boynton. I contend that the genre, and the sexist bias within it, go back much further.

In college, I wrote a paper about the “stunt-girl reporters” of the turn of the last century, of which Nellie Bly, Djuna Barnes and Ida B. Wells were the most famous: Bly had herself committed to a madhouse for 10 days and Barnes submitted to force-feeding, among other risky, high-profile assignments. The gender bias was completely ingrained then; when a male reporter, like Jacob Riis, did such a thing, it was called participatory journalism. When a female reporter did it, it was called a stunt.

While there is a great and proud tradition of reporters-turned-authors, it has always been an old-boy’s club. No matter how dangerous her assignments, how long and hard she has to work on a story, or how great her literary skill, the supposed benefits of a journalistic background are just never accorded to women authors the way they are to men.

So who are the new queens of nonfiction? For one, I nominate Mary Roach. Not only is her subject matter fascinating, she goes to some pretty great lengths to get to the bottom of it, and she’s hilarious to boot. The fact that she wasn’t included in Glass’ book just proves that he really needs to broaden his literary horizons.