A Look Back at Twelve Years of Green Pages

BY BILL PICTURE

I have to admit my own carbon footprint wasn’t as light as it could have been back in 2007, when Bay Crossings asked me to contribute a monthly feature about environmental sustainability for a new section it planned to call the “Green Pages.”

Sure, I recycled. I’m pretty sure my flatmates and I even had a little compost bin under the kitchen sink back then. But I definitely drove more than I took public transit, I drank bottled water (even at home), I didn’t buy organic or local (in my defense, that really wasn’t a trend back in 2007), and my response at the supermarket checkout line was always “plastic, please.”

I think I also still brushed my teeth with the faucet on. Pretty bad, I know. These are definitely all verboten today if you have any semblance of a conscience and/or care at all about leaving behind a working planet for future generations.

The first Green Pages column was about a San Francisco-based consultancy firm that was helping big companies “green” (it would be a few years before “sustainable” really caught on) their operations, right down to sourcing organic coffee for the employee break room.

I googled the company just now. It’s not around anymore—but the idea of corporate responsibility that it helped inspire has since evolved into a movement, one that I’m happy to report can now accurately be described as widespread.

That first piece also inspired me to look in the mirror and do some green housekeeping of my own. For starters, I began turning the faucet off while I brushed my teeth—baby steps, folks, baby steps.

A later story prompted me to clear out all the chemical-laden cleaners and detergents that were taking up space under my kitchen sink. By the way, what were we thinking using those? Those “pine” and “citrus” scents that we grew up with (and that burned our sinuses) didn’t smell like home at all; they smelled like a laboratory. Anyway, that in turn led me to start looking more closely at all ingredient lists.

But perhaps the most important thing to come out of those very first columns for me was the burning question “What more can I do?” In fact, it would inspire every column to come.

Enough isn’t enough, actually 

“What you’re doing now is great, but here’s what else you can do.” That was the approach taken by another organization featured in an early Green Pages. That organization identified retail products containing harmful toxins and then appealed to manufacturers’ socially conscious shareholders to push from within for products that were safe for consumers and the environment. That’s also how they got Home Depot to stop selling lumber from old growth forests.

At that time, the organization had next set its sights on the beverage industry, which it wanted to take more responsibility for packaging. One idea they had was to use shareholder muscle to pressure companies like Coca Cola and Pepsi to build recycling facilities to deal with the 167 plastic bottles that Ban the Bottle says the average American tosses each year.

“If a company knows it’s going to have to be responsible for properly disposing of [their product], then they’ll be more savvy about the way they put together new products,” said the organization’s founder.

That prompted me to really think about how all my purchases are packaged: “What if instead of patting myself on the back every time I toss a plastic bottle in the recycling bin, I just don’t buy anything in a plastic bottle?”

Naturally, bottled water was the first thing to go. Who knew that San Francisco has some of the best-quality municipal tap water in the country? Of course, a conservationist friend later pointed out to me that San Francisco’s tasty water comes at the expense of acres of wilderness flooded to create the reservoir that quenches San Franciscans’ ever-growing thirst. But I digress.

During interviews I used to ask subjects what they believe stands between humans and a more sustainable existence in this day and age—when the effects of not doing so are literally staring us in the face and we know that even the most seemingly simple change to our everyday routine can have dramatic, measurable results. “Cost and inconvenience” were the two most common replies.

I still ask that question sometimes, and 12 years later the answer is still the same. It’s frustrating, but that frustration has spawned an entire industry dedicated to finding ways to make sustainability easier and more affordable. Go green tech!

Not knowing any different is the goal

Over the course of Green Pages’ life, I’ve written a lot of stories about efforts to teach sustainability to young people, and to get them excited to participate in shaping their future.

One of those pieces was about young people in a historically underserved part of San Francisco taking to the streets to educate neighbors about simple energy- and water-saving measures. Another piece showcased a program that uses gardening to inspire hope in at-risk youth and expose them to the simple joys of being outdoors by giving them a chance to literally get their hands dirty.

The world has efforts like these to thank for young activists like Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old Swedish girl who accused world leaders of being asleep at the wheel while the Earth burns at the recent United Nations Climate Change Summit.

The fear is that some world leaders’ proposed rollbacks of environmental regulations (that are clearly working) could spark a widespread apathy that sets environmentalism back years. After all, that head-in-the sand response (“If I don’t acknowledge it, then it’s not happening”) has a way of rubbing off on the masses.

Hopefully, Greta and her generation can speak loudly enough to stave off that apathy, at least long enough for the notion of a sustainable existence to become second nature for most.

You see, sustainability has until now meant replacing old habits with new ones—and as the saying goes, “Old habits die hard.” But Greta’s generation has the benefit of not knowing what life was like before we woke up and realized, “Oh no, we screwed up the environment.”

For instance, she’s never known plastic to be anything other than a nuisance to be avoided. For her, a hybrid or electric vehicle has always been the ultimate car. So that should be the goal—get us to a point where anything other than sustainable practices is so foreign and strange-sounding that it’s not even an option.