The Environmental Impact of Divorce  
     In times of personal crisis, concern for the welfare of the larger world diminishes.  So I haven't been thinking much about the environment this past year as my family dissolved in the agony of divorce.  Yet a few weeks ago, after I moved into a new house and began a new life, my concerns as an environmentalist and teacher of environmental ethics began to re-emerge from the diminishing chaos and pain.
     Only a day or two after the move, I set up a clothes line in the back yard and a second line in the attic for rainy days.  Soon thereafter I built compost bins.  These things my new neighbors watched, I think, with bemusement.  (I have seen no other clothes lines and few compost bins in the neighborhood.)  Their suspicions of my eccentricity were confirmed a day or two later when I mowed the lawn with a scythe.  No gas.  No pollution.  No noise.  My old neighbors were used to this.
     My new house has an electric water heater and an electric stove instead of the natural gas we used in my old home.  Electricity is more expensive and less efficient than natural gas; and, it is generated chiefly by the burning of coal, which contributes more to smog, global warming and acid rain.  Eventually, I want to replace the electric stove with gas and the electric water heater with a gas on-demand heater, the kind that heats water only when you turn on the faucet, thus reducing both my bills and my commerce with the coal plants of TVA.  But both are costly, and I am poorer since the divorce.
     Some losses are irremediable.  Divorce means, for example, more time spent on the road.  When we were an integral family, the kids did not have to be ferried back and forth between households.  We made do with one car, and I commuted by bike.  Often I would go a whole week without driving.  Now, most days, I take the car, and the exercise I used to get riding must be gotten otherwise or lost.
     For me one of the most painful losses was leaving my gardens and orchards.  I had spent well over a decade enriching the organic soil of my hand-built terraces and carefully tending my fruit trees.  The gardens provided ample and nutritious vegetables year round; the trees bore fruit from June through November.
     There are some chestnut trees at my new house, and I will plant fruit trees this fall, but it will take a decade to restore the fruit production.  The vegetable gardens, fortunately, will be easier to re-establish.  There is a clause in the divorce agreement that allows me to dismantle the terraces at my old house and haul off the soil.  This summer I will build new raised beds, truck in the old soil, and be back in operation for fall planting.  But in the meantime, I am eating store-bought vegetables, which are expensive both financially and ecologically and disconcertingly less tasty than organic home-grown.
     The destruction of a family is a symptom of the unhappy fragmentation of our culture and time.  Each member of what used to be the family now arranges her or his life in ways that seem individually suitable, but wholeness, integrity and efficiency are lost.  In the urgent effort to diminish individual pain, we lose, even if temporarily, the ability to care for the larger world.  Yet maybe, if the hurt is not too deep, we learn something too.
     I was ideally placed in my old family to carry out my ideals.  It was thus, perhaps, too easy for me to castigate those less ecologically holy than I.  Now that my life is less than ideally arranged, I can better understand the necessities under which others labor.  Single parents cannot easily be ecological saints.  We must allow for the debilities of personal pain and broken lives.  Allow for, but not be paralyzed by; for what ultimately matters is still the larger world. Radio Commentary Index Home