Mug shot.

• Author: Prugh, Tom
• Position: ESSAY - Editorial

The other day one of the Worldwatch staff gave a talk on global climate change to a small Green Sanctuary church group. As is usual with these talks, a handful of people lingered afterwards to offer private comments or questions. The questions are normally polite creampuffs, and the speaker gets to enjoy the warm glow that comes from being regarded as an "expert." But this time one question didn't follow the script. A young woman reproachfully asked the staffer, who had been sipping from a foam cup of coffee prior to his talk, why he had done such a horrible thing?

So simple to use a ceramic mug instead, she chided--especially since he'd brought one, as a visual aid (when filled with hot liquid, it shows the world's coastlines receding as the polar icecaps melt).

Ouch.

Face flushing, the staffer mumbled something about how it's impossible to live a perfect life. Then he rather smugly pointed out that the questioner's polyester jersey was made from oil. And naturally most of his brain, as insulted brains do, immediately began working on a snappier comeback. By the time he got home, it went something like, "I compost, I recycle, I drive a hybrid gas/electric vehicle--fewer miles per year than average--I keep the thermostat at 68 in the winter and 78 in the summer, I have new storm windows and low-flow showerheads, I commute to work by bike and subway, I send money to pay for tree planting in Central America to offset my carbon emissions and restore rain forest, and I took a pay cut to work for the environment. And by the way, your sweater is made from oil, your cotton pants are unsustainable, your wool socks exploit animals--how can you live with yourself?"

When the fever passed, however, the stark truth remained: the questioner had a point. With a little forethought and effort, the staffer could have used a mug. Failing to do so was one more lost opportunity to make a small difference in landfill usage and/or greenhouse gases emitted or toxics released into the atmosphere. Billions of people around the world have little choice about their lifestyles, but even those of us lucky enough to have such choices often fail to make the sustainable ones. And those multitudes of failures, each one so trivial, add up to disaster. By the eco-footprint methodology, humanity exceeded the level of global sustainability sometime around 1978.

Can we ceramic-mug our way to a sustainable future? No--but we can't get there without it, either.

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