Treehumper

Sustainability is all the rage these days. Buy a hybrid, compost in your backyard, reduce-reuse-recycle, et cetera. I say we’ve gone too far, and I decided to do something about it. And you know what else is all the rage these days? Personal experiments used ostensibly to prove a larger point but that always come off as self-serving and media whoring anyway. So I jumped on board: I am Huge Impact Man, and I spent the last year absolutely raping the natural world and everything in it.

First step? Building efficiency. I haven’t turned off the air conditioning in 11 months, even when I turned the heat to 86 degrees. Of course, I was visiting friends in San Francisco for that week, so I’m not sure exactly what my apartment felt like. I left the windows open though, so passersby could get an idea.

When my landlord wanted to install a fancy new boiler that would cut costs and emissions in half, I told him to go fuck himself. He threatened to evict me, but I told him I knew about the little boys who left through his door at odd hours, and he shut up quickly. It was a shot in the dark — I didn’t even know he lives in the building — but it seems to have hit close enough to home to make him forget that I made a habit of running the hot water for months on end.

Next step? Food. This was a tough one, because I would love to import only the finest beef from Argentina, but I obviously have to encourage the factory farming and inhumane slaughterhouse practices of the US midwest. I compromised by making a pilgrimage to one of those feedlot/slaughterhouses and then punching Michael Pollan in the face.

I also eat only fruits and vegetables that couldn’t possibly be grown in this country. Who needs corn? I get enough of that in my daily McDonald’s trip. I want a Malaysian guava. Finally, I went to all the local farmers’ markets and set them on fire. I might have killed a few people, but I swear that wasn’t the intent. After all, I encourage the population explosion! Fuck like rabbits! Who needs birth control? Hell, the freaking POPE is against it!

Travel was another big one. I actually flew from New York to Minneapolis today just so I could go to the library, log in and click the publish button. I have taken 422 flights encompassing more than 525,000 miles in the last year. Where did I get the money to do this? My book deal and energy lobbying firms, of course. Those Exxon-Mobil guys sure are nice.

I bought a Hummer, obviously, but I insisted on it being painted using the blood of a polar bear. Well, it ended up needing 11 polar bears; for big fuckers those bears don’t have much usable blood. I flew to Fairbanks to go on the hunt for those bears, of course. I couldn’t live with myself if I made someone else do my dirty work. Also, I retrofitted the hummer with an engine from 1949; it emits 48 tons of carbon dioxide per mile. And I drove 297,965 miles in the last year. Eat it, atmosphere.

Those were the main areas of my enviroFuckery. There were some random bits thrown in there: I blew up a forest, went to Alberta and peed into a tar sands tailings pond, threw a flaming bag of poop over Al Gore’s fence, and left my cell phone charger plugged in ALL FUCKING YEAR. I feel pretty good about it. I think I set back the environmental movement at least a decade or two, and I got to appear on The View! Fuck yeah!