The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

America’s Original Environmentalist: Aunt Edna Marie

By George Lightbourn

Green is no longer just a mixture of blue and yellow. Green has come to define huge swatches of America’s policy and political landscape.

They never really say it, but the people behind America’s green movement would have us believe that we have sinned. Our extravagant consumption and unrelenting devotion to self-interest has led to a day of reckoning. The air in our major cities is befouled, and “the scientific community” has discovered, that we are jeopardizing the entire planet.

With the zeal of a revivalist preacher, they tell us that our cars are too big, our houses are too warm in the winter and too cool in the summer. They’ve made us aware that every time we turn on a light switch we cause more crud to belch out of some distant smokestack.

I’d like to introduce every one of these dour purveyors of gloom to my aunt Edna Marie. Edna Marie, now in her eighties, might have been America’s original environmentalist. We like to tease her about her frugality but the fact is, that long before Al Gore began inventing the internet, Edna Marie was busy inventing conservation and recycling.

Everyone in the family has received a perfectly good coat or sweater or chair that Edna Marie found at a garage sale. And at family picnics she has us eating off of the small, Styrofoam trays that the grocery store puts under the hamburger she buys. “They wash up just fine,” she’s told us time after time.

True, Edna Marie owns a rather large Buick, but she would never feel right about spending what it would cost to park an import in her garage. And a Prius – forget about it. “Who would spend all that just for a little car?” But Edna Marie would always rather share a ride and her trips to the casinos are always by bus.

It is also true that she owns a big, honking window air conditioner. Every spring her son diligently hauls the behemoth out of the basement and fixes it securely in her window. He turns it on to make sure it’s in working order which, in most years, is about the only time that “machine” is ever put to use. “I don’t think it’s too hot and besides, I get a nice breeze through here.”

Wisconsin’s winter winds are kept outside of Edna Marie’s house, not with Energy Star rated triple-pane glass but with the plastic sheeting that come three to a kit at the hardware store. “Every once in awhile you can find them at garage sales,” she says.

Yet I’ve never heard her discuss global warming or Rachel Carson or Paul Watson. She would never refer to anyone as a social parasite and would be amused by any self-appointed earth warriors.

She has no T shirts with whales or bumper stickers and would never give a penny of her Social Security check away to the Greens. Neither Al Gore nor Bono would want to be photographed with Edna Marie.

Yet it is Edna Marie who should be the face of conservation in America. She isn’t at war with any one and she just wouldn’t feel right telling someone else how they should run their life. She just shows us how it’s done, which always packs more punch than telling us what to do. You see, Edna Marie’s carbon footprint is the size of a ballerina’s slipper. She lives very comfortably and is as happy as anyone I know – quite a contrast to the gloomy, T-shirted, slogan-spewing know-it-alls that convene at places like Davos to design environmental hair shirts for us to wear. Next year they should just come to Edna Marie’s. She’ll teach them the realities of conservation and maybe she’ll feed them off of her recycled Styrofoam dinnerware.

-April 30, 2009

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