House Of Mirrors

I look up at the sky and see a blanket of gray. There are no individual clouds, no whisps of air beating between them, no chalky train of smoke left over from an aircraft. The wet back porch is stained a deep hazelnut. My cleats crunch over them carelessly, looking to clean themselves of last week’s unwelcomed pebbles. Above them are my shin-guards, bracing for battle, the humble size of two grocery store zucchinis. They’re wrapped in bright yellow socks lightly brushed in dirt and will shortly be joined by a stampede of cousins who unanimously call themselves the yellow team.

I take a few good stomps on the wooden planks. After a few unsuccessful jumps I petulantly give in to taking my cleats off, sad to see the dismemberment of my mother’s perfect bunny ears, and pour the stubborn pebbles out. Their black miniscule bodies scatter across the wood. Here they held no dictating rule dispersed across the enormity of Earth. They were now mere prisoners of war silently waiting for the external to move them at their will. Again, and again, and again.

Twenty years later I don’t own a pair of yellow soccer socks. Outside of work and select demographics, I don’t belong to any type of group. For most of my time spent, it’s just me and my own individual buzz, existing inside my apartment. But to sociologists, scientists, and society at large, on the mighty cup winning team of 7 billion people, I am a driving force of climate change.

The blush pink balloons tied to 452’s mailbox announcing my newfound existence had already cost the Earth an additional barbell of weight to bare. By the time I reached potty training age I had used at least 6,500 disposable diapers. The pineapple house mountain of diapers SpongeBob presented to Patrick seems comically innocent compared to that. Maternity clothes, car seats, cribs, pacifiers, socks and bottles were hefted into my parent’s carts. All of this and all the other miscellaneous baby merchandise that, at their peak, held a poignant baby shower bonnet ribbon on top its package and at its downfall, contributed to the 209 million tons of garbage accumulated by the United States that year. In 1995 there was 360 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere. Today we are surrounded by 416 ppm.

A few years later I walked into the artificial arms of Chuckie Cheese. I had no sense of what a nickel was (other than having the sister name of do-not-ever-put-that-in-your-mouth) and already I was bulldozing through consumerism at an alarming rate. My parents were running around in endless cycles of the year’s most demanded Christmas presents, boardwalk ice cream, Elmo talking toys, pooh bear pajamas, the first trip to Disneyland, the second trip to Disneyland, the private school education so I could know how to spell b-l-u-e faster than the other kids on my block. Time magazine reports that although children in the US make up 3.1% of the world’s population, US families buy more than 40% of the toys purchased globally. I remember leaping around with sore foot soles as I ventured across the toy cluttered rug of my basement, somehow always making room for a happy meal companion or a sibling’s new monthly muse. I had no understanding of how to find a toy or where exactly all of the Great Adventure characters lived but all it took was a satisfactory smile to encourage the excessive spending of those around me; those who loved me more precisely. The force of love, that Voldemort-slaying-Bradley-Cooper-guilty-grin that keeps everyone happy and consuming all at the small price of the additional Celsius or two entering the atmosphere. Of course, love is not like that at all. But it is something close.

In the second grade I won a drawing contest and was awarded one hundred dollars. I knew what one hundred was on my multiplication chart but I was at a loss of how to make use of it as a currency. Lucky for me the iPod nano heard my inept cries of desperation. I took home a heavy blue iPod of my own, three crappy games and all, and felt unstoppable. This was only the beginning of course. My admiring eyes would welcome me into the average US household, which consumes nearly three times as much as other countries. My purchases weren’t always materialistic. Sometimes it was a sour cry baby from the ice cream stand at the horse-riding camp. Or a clutch of bills folded into the UNICEF cup I twisted into life on my desk. I did listen to the lessons around me about how to care for the world, how to be mindful of the other animals that share the planet. Two retired women came into my fifth-grade class to remind us all to flush only if we really need to. The dolphin trainers told us that sea animals can die from floating debris in the sea. Even Barnie found his spot on my TV, preaching about peacefully coexisting with your next-door kookaburra. That mindfulness was working some of the time. Except most of the time there was a rib crushing push ramming me against the wall; a thick stampede of friends and Instagram posts and Hollister sweaters. That sweet backhanding friend of yours, the Joneses.

Back in my overly saturated Instagram days of college, the thought of having a reoccurring outfit on my feed felt embarrassing. As a life-long fashionista, my wardrobe was always an important part of expressing who I was. But in the age of social media, I started to put less emphasis on practicality in my outfits and began purchasing purely for how the outfit would look in a post. I could be uncomfortable all day, baby pins itching the back of my neck, ripped jeans creeping up to my thigh, and all of it would be worth it for that one instantaneous photo moment that I could share with hundreds of followers. I wasn’t alone too; Forbes says that 81% of consumers purchasing choices are influenced by their friend’s posts on social media. I imagine the number is even higher among college students and young adults. Approximately 60% of fast fashion items are produced and thrown out in the same year. Ouch. Second hand and vintage stores are getting more attention along with apps like Depop that allow consumers to purchase used clothes. It’s a great trend to see, but advisories warn that we’re not going to buy our way out of fast fashion. It’s the culture shift of appreciating what we do have that will take us further in our development.

There’s little me growing up and then there is the US at large. A lot of consumer statistics you’ll find are centered around the US. But is the United States the only one to blame? If you look at the golden countries, Norway and Sweden for example, who have implemented great sustainability throughout the country and compare it to the United States…we look awful. If you consider though, that Norway has the mere peanut size of 5 million people, Sweden 10 million, and the United States a whopping 335 million, it’s a little easier to see the bigger picture. Not the whole picture of course, (the US is still way ahead in carbon emissions as compared to India) but more of it. Take for instance that there are 48,500 storage facilities nationwide and only 10,000 outside of the US. We see it, we get it; the US has an exorbitant amount of stuff. But then there’s Richard Heede’s research that showed that nearly 2/3 of carbon emissions originated from just 90 companies and government run industries. This figure included gas giants like BP and Exxon. But what about the incredibly rich, taking planes left and right, cruising on yachts? How do they get factored into the pie chart? And where does that leave present day me, confessing my sins of using disposable paper towels as opposed to a reusable bees wax alternative?

Hundreds of articles have double jointed fingers on where exactly to point the blame to. On YouTube you can find an interesting video by the Car Guys TV explaining the misleading selling point of electronic cars being better for the environment. Manufacturing the electric car itself takes up way more carbon emissions than it does for any fuel-based model. And electricity in most areas is not the holy grail we think it is; we get a good portion of it from fossil fuels. On top of that transportation as a whole is not nearly as large a percentage of climate change as we would like to think, roughly 14% of it is connected to transportation. A lot of the blame has much more to do with industries and governments at large than it does with the individual. This makes me think of the stubby Uncle Sam finger pointing at me through a social studies text book, except now its panning alongside of me through every waking decision I make. It’s your fault for booking a flight, for driving to work, for putting a block of meat on the table. Putting so much of the blame on the individual is toxic. Its like handing over a PlayStation controller when the game is in an automatic demo mode and saying “here, you try!” It makes us feel like we can make a difference only to find that we’ve been pawned. Not just of money and time, but of the existence of our planet.

Its unsure how exactly the future will be handled with future generations. A University of Leeds study says that Americans will have to cut their energy use by more than 90% and families of four should live in housing no larger than 640 square feet if we want a sustainable future. Sounds easily doable right? It’s also a more common anxiety to find adults riddled with the debate about bringing less children, only one child, or even none at all into a world like ours. A 2017 study found that opting out of having a child would reduce emissions by 60 metric tons per year. The decision to become a parent comes with a plethora of many variables that go well beyond climate change. Yet here it is, a notable deciding factor in the fate of human kind. Not the cold war angst our grandmothers held, but something both communist and capitalist nations held no sword to. Of mankind, but greater than all the same.

There’s a meme called “the illusion of free choice.” It pictures a cow staring at what looks to be two separate paths, but they both lead to the same place.

It feels as though all of the doors for change that open for me lead to the same end. Am I really improving the Earth if I choose organic labeled eggs or walk to the park instead of drive? How influential is a backyard garden when there are thousands of shipping containers in transit across the Pacific? What is it worth to pick up a deflated balloon at the beach when the fishing industry has polluted the ocean for decades?

Did I ever really have a climate changing decision in the first place?

There are days I view myself as an unimportant black pebble, rolling around, again and again and again, at the complete whim of an external force. A presence in the universe with a disabling lack of mobility. I wonder how the sky would look to a grandchild, if their cleats would hold artificial turf compounds and a blazing sun loomed over them. If I had a kid, what unspoken privileges would I hold over them; a dew kissed soccer field, an atmosphere of 416ppm of carbon, the soft tread of cleats over water kissed wood. I hope the little change I can offer leads to a new door.

A sustainable hope, in this house of mirrors we call home.