shingo2008

 Last week,

towels  I confessed to being a bad traveler

. This week, I confess to something much worse. I resist and resentthe demands made on me by environmental imperatives. I don "t wantto save the planet. I just want to inhabit it as comfortably aspossible for as long as I have.

 Things reached something of a crisis point a few days ago when mywife asked me to read a communique from Greenpeace. (She thought,she told me, that if I read it rather than hearing about it fromher, my unhappiness would be directed at the organization.) It saidthat Kimberly-Clark, the maker of the paper towels, facial tissueand toilet paper we buy, does not use recycled fiber and instead Sgets its virgin wood fiber clear-cut from . . . the NorthAmerican Boreal . . . one of the world "s most importantforests.  And that meant, she told me, that we would have to givethose items up and go in search of green alternatives. But we hadalready done that once before when it turned out that themanufacturer of the paper products we used to buy — Procterand Gamble — engaged in research on animals. That "s when wefound Kimberly-Clark. So it seems that the pure were not so pureafter all, and who "s to say that the next corporation won "thave an ecological skeleton in its closet, too?

 What rankled me most was the toilet paper, but when I protested, mywife smiled at me with a mixture of indulgence and contempt. Someyears ago, I beat back an attempt to eliminate paper towelsaltogether and replace them with re-washable rags. But there aretoo many battles to be fought and I find that I am losing most ofthem. I did retain the right to have a small supply of papernapkins in an out-of-the-way cupboard. (I hate cloth napkins; youalways have to worry about soiling them; paper napkins you justthrow away, which is of course the problem.) But my house is nowfull of environmentally approved lightbulbs. They are dim, ugly andexpensive, but I am told that they will last beyond my lifetime.(That "s supposed to be reassuring?) A neighbor told me today thathe is planning to stockpile incandescent bulbs in the face of aprediction that they will be phased out by 2012.