Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You

By ALEX WILLIAMS

HOT KERNELS Mike Tidwell’s silo holds 22 tons of organically fertilized corn used for heat.

Though he had quit his job as a journalist to work for environmental nonprofit organizations, Mr. Tidwell viewed suburbs (his own hometown is just outside of Washington) as places built “to defy nature,” he said, giving everyone “their own little kingdom of grass and space” — not to mention 3,000-square-foot houses, heated swimming pools and hulking S.U.V.’s.

For years, Mr. Tidwell led an environmental campaign, one with few followers. In 2002, he started a neighborhood cooperative to buy and distribute organically fertilized corn kernels to burn in pellet stoves (a lower-emissions alternative to traditional fuel-oil boilers). At first, the cooperative consisted of just him and three other residents.

But lately, after the release of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and last summer’s Live Earth concerts, his corn collective has ballooned to more than 70 members, some coming from more distant Maryland suburbs like Bethesda and Silver Spring. The group even built a 25-foot-tall cylindrical granary, holding 22 tons of corn, in a small lot belonging to Takoma Park.

Attitudes, Mr. Tidwell said, changed, too. “In the American suburbs, people are suddenly literate in the language of carbon emissions and carbon footprints,” he said. “I’m hearing it in most mainstream places.”

Last summer, Mr. Tidwell attended a picnic where, he said, a guest had brought a plate of kiwi fruit imported from New Zealand. “This very nonhippie, not-environmental-cliché-type woman I heard asking another person, ‘I wonder what the carbon budget of these kiwis are?’ ” he said. “I was just astonished.”

If the United States is ever to reduce its carbon emissions, suburbanites — that is, roughly half of all Americans, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution — are going to have to play a big role. And lately, they are trying.

Since 2005, the mayors of hundreds of suburban communities across America have pledged to meet or even beat the emissions goals set by the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty to reduce greenhouse emissions.

In November, Levittown, N.Y., the model postwar suburb, declared its intentions to cut carbon emissions by 10 percent this year. And a few suburban pioneers are choosing solar heating for their pools, clotheslines for their backyard, or hybrid cars for their commute.

But the problem with suburbs, many environmentalists say, is not an issue of light bulbs. In the end, the very things that make suburban life attractive — the lush lawns, spacious houses and three-car garages — also disproportionally contribute to global warming. Suburban life, these environmentalists argue, is simply not sustainable.

“The very essence of the post-Second World War America suburb militates against ‘greening,’ ” said Thomas J. Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Given the almost complete dependency of suburbanites on the car, it’s an uphill battle.”

Cities, for their part, have been trumpeting their green credentials. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York has made much of his plan to reduce carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030. (Already, the average denizen of New York City produces 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases each year, according to statistics compiled for the city government, compared with 24.5 metric tons for the average American.)

Longtime suburban residents might wonder how they suddenly became environmentally incorrect. People who moved to the suburbs in the ’50’s and ’60’s thought they were being green just by doing so, said Robert Beauregard, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University.

Then, green “just meant open space and privacy,” Professor Beauregard said. “Those Levittowns were ‘green’ because they had lawns.”

The bar is considerably higher now.

Aileen Eilert, an accountant who in lives Lisle, Ill., about 30 miles west of Chicago, recently bought a 70-foot wind turbine to install in her family’s backyard. The turbine, which cost $12,000, will generate all the household power and more; the family will trade the excess back to the local power company for credits. It should pay for itself in about 10 years, she said.

Yes, the neighbors may talk. One neighbor, she said, was skeptical, asking, “So what is this going to look like?” But most, added Ms. Eilert, 47, simply said, “If it doesn’t bother me and make noise, I don’t care.” (They may not be so easily mollified by her next campaign, to persuade neighbors to replace their lawns with vegetable and fruit gardens, in an effort to reduce the emissions involved in buying, say, strawberries from Chile.) Alexander Lee, the 33-year-old founder of Project Laundry List, which tries to revive the use of clotheslines to save energy, has run into plenty of resistance from suburban community associations, many of which have regulations restricting them, he said.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 19 February 2008, 16.03 sore)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.nytimes.com)