This weekend the Green Living Show came to Toronto, assembling over 400 eco exhibitors in the Direct Energy center. It’s a show I’ve looked forward to since my first visit last year, an opportunity to try new products and hunt for deals, a day of aspirational living.
But I am, at times, an ambivalent ecoholic. I am fanatical about recycling and composting and electricity use. I use earth-friendly cleaning products. I reuse and freecycle. I grow as much of my own (organic) food as possible. I try to eat less meat, and “happy” meat. I take public transit, walk a lot, and am working on my two-wheeler relationship. But that said, there are so many things I don’t do. There are so many things that I’m even afraid to acknowledge that I should do, because so often it leads to guilt and anger.
A big part of the reason is that I feel lied to. By my government who I trusted to protect me from hazardous chemicals, but who I shouldn’t have, given all the insidious things that are in everyday products. By the companies who made those products. By advertisers and beauty magazines who told me I need the product, or at least that I should want it. That it’ll make me “better,” when secretly it might be harming me.
And of course being an ecoholic can be pricey. All the products that are genuinely green have much higher price points, they go on sale less frequently, and it’s hard to comparison shop when they’re harder to find. And being even more fanatical about frugality than I am about recycling, this is a very difficult one for me. (But I think hunting for green bargains may just the new frontier of thriftiness.) To be fair, being green is not always more expensive, but depending on your level of DIY skills (mine are middling at best), it certainly can be. (And I know when you take into environmental and health care costs, these products are cheaper, but when I feel short-sighted and selfish, these long term investments don’t seem as urgent as my current bank balance.)
Being an ecoholic also opens up a new hypersensitivity, when even a trip to a public bathroom is fraught with water wastage, individually wrapped toilet paper, bad-chemical goo in soap form, and a trash bin overflowing with used paper towels. And that’s just a couple of minutes of one day. Add in the fact that so many people don’t seem to care, and sometimes it’s just easier to switch off, to go back to the world I was raised in, where Mr. Clean and Maybelline are a-okay, because otherwise it’s exhausting.
So thank god for Adria Vasil. I’ve written about the NOW! columnist’s first book, Ecoholic, before, and it’s a guide I’d recommend to anyone. Since then she’s expanded into two additional volumes, Ecoholic Home (2009) and Ecoholic Body (2012). At first I thought these would just be redundant, as there is some overlap with the first book, but they’re not. They go much deeper than the original guide (at 352 pages) could have. (In fact, Ecoholic Body weighs in at a mean 480.) These tomes manage to be both encyclopedic and accessible, really breaking things down, analyzing every product category you could think of, from sex toys to t-shirt printing. Vasil also pulls out sidebars of essential info including extra resources, DIY projects, chemical hit lists, or certification logo decoders. It’s shocking stuff: for an example, check out Vasil’s recent NOW piece in which she subjects herself to lab tests to see what chemicals lurk in her body. Ecoholic Home and Body also top-notch consumer guides, offering ratings of the most popular products, whether window cleaners or underarm deodorants. Here they really pay off, because, especially where the health and beauty products are concerned, it can be a long, costly, and occasionally unattractive road to finding an effective product. Because we all love pretty things, it’s worth mentioning that like the first book, these sequels are beautifully designed by Kelly Hill — the two-colour text adorned with gorgeous line drawings and plenty of sidebars and callouts to add visual interest.
Though perhaps the greatest strength of Vasil’s books are their tone. Her writing is hard hitting but lively, sometimes funny, and not meant to make you feel bad. It’s just meant to make you want to try harder, to open your eyes to things as they are, public bathrooms and all. She doesn’t thrust blame on individual consumers, but on corporations and governments, and she gives you the info you need to make yourself heard to them.
And, ambivalent as I can sometimes be, I’m making progress, in small steps, one product or habit at a time. In the immortal words of that noble frog sage, “It’s not easy being green,” but with an ace ecoholic like Adria Vasil on your side, things get a little bit easier.
