Your household divided by a green line?

Do you diligently recycle every item in your house? Have you given up buying bottled water and even bring home bottles and food containers from places where recycling isn’t available? Have you opted for more vegetarian meals and created a plan to recycle gray water to your garden? Then you are someone who believes the planet is in trouble and are willing to make lifestyle choices to support your eco-concerns.

Then there’s your significant other: well-mannered, smart, a perfect fit, and totally opposed to giving up meat even one day a week. He/she recycles when it’s convenient, refuses to give up long showers, and doesn’t believe small personal choices have any impact whatsoever on global warming.

You are at odds. It’s a source of constant friction: he scowls at the vegetarian chili; she resents the single-ply toilet paper and the constant washing of his reusable water bottle. And worst of all is the sense of moral superiority that the significant other exudes while performing small acts of green living.

According to an article this week in the New York Times, therapists are counseling more and more couples who are having a hard time reconciling their green practices. It is their observation that:

“While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct.”

As climate change becomes an ever more divisive issue, not based on the science which is irrefutable, but on different personal values, it can lead to a parting of the ways. Some couples now look deep into their future and see different journeys and destinations as their partner adopts more green values. At stake now are differing ideas on how to live, how to invest money, what to eat, and what values to pass on to the children. There may soon be a need for a new kind of therapist: a sort of eco-therapist who can help couples and families to work out differences regarding green practices.

So here’s our question:  Does a green line divide your household? Between those who choose to live green and those that don’t?  The weekly poll is in the right sidebar.

– Deborah Moulton