Mother’s Day tomorrow. I’m home for the weekend. Our new house is shiny and clean, a freshly minted condominium community by Ryan Homes. There is one problem: there is no recycling.

Well, that’s technically not true. There’s recycling, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do it. You have to call the main office. Find out if trash pickup is done by the town. If so, you have to go to a local “convenience center.” Pick up a yellow bin. Put it out by the dumpster weekly. Hope it doesn’t get run over by the garbage truck, etc. My mom can’t be bothered. And I can’t convince her otherwise.

So I resign myself to tossing my (rinsed out) yogurt cup, my soda can, my orange juice carton, the 30 thin little plastic shopping bags you put vegetables in, the junk mail, etc. etc. (I actually experience a little clench of physical agony in my gut when doing this.) In the trash it all goes! In less than 24 hours time, the newly taken out trash is duly replenished.

Obviously, I feel like I have failed to live up to my principles. In my capacity as a closet activist, I’ve always believed that personal influence speaks stronger than picket signs. So I try to make everyone around me recycle. It isn’t much, but it’s the easiest, most immediately obvious way of doing something enviro-good, and most people can handle that.

So far I’ve been lucky; my friends and housemates have tolerated my exhortations to recycle and reuse extremely well. I’ve even convinced Jia, who absolutely hates washing Ziploc bags, to wash and use them repeatedly. Sometimes. But it’s progress.

With my mom, it’s just totally not possible. Short of starting a familial civil war, it’s just not gonna happen. But it seems wrong, because she’s family. And family should be the most susceptible to influence of all, right?

In the end, it’s probably not going to be worth it. But it’s frustrating to think that my housemates and I have gotten so good at reducing our waste (we take out the trash like once every 3 weeks… I know, gross. But it isn’t even full), and then here is someone I actually know, someone with whom I share genes, not recycling! The horror! I’m being totally sincere, by the way. And she uses all those little plastic bags to buy apples and oranges at the supermarket! I feel like my proverbial carbon has been offest. In the wrong direction.

I am comforted somewhat by the fact that recycling isn’t a perfect process, and actually might increase your carbon footprint. It’s a lot of heavy manufacturing to rework those papers and plastics into something usable again. And recycling paper actually generates buckets of toxic sludge from the de-inking and bleaching process. Cradle to cradle is a long way off…

Sigh, what can one little person do, other than keep washing those yogurt cups.

I woke up this morning feeling surreal. Did this really happen? Did we really elect him? Did we just witness history?

The answer is holy crap, YES. YES, I lived through and witnessed something amazing. All of a sudden, for an exquisite moment, the weight of humankind’s past story and future hopes and all of our progress was so palpable I could perhaps poke it. Jess said to me, “Years from now your children will be amazed that you were there. That you cast a vote that helped put Barack Obama in office. They will ask you, ‘What were you doing when the results came in? What were you doing when history was made?’” (And I will say, “Uh, doing some art project I think.”)

But yes, forget the theoretical children. I can hardly believe it myself. We were all there!

And today, I am so elated and inspired and, dare I say it, hopeful that I can hardly concentrate on work. This is proof that the democratic process works, that the people can get their voices heard, that the US can overcome the inertia of the powerful conservative heartland and move on to try something new.

Only time will tell if “something new” is something positive, but I don’t think we will have hoped in vain. I think that riding on the wings of optimism alone, an emotion which the former Senator was so great at instilling, will tide us through many the problems we’ve piled onto ourselves. It may just be a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing.

Oh man. I’ve never been this riled up over an election before. But did I mention this was remarkable?

I read an interesting article in the NYT last week while researching the fate of Burt’s Bees. We’ve all heard the sad story about how it was bought out by evil chemical giant Clorox, and woe is small companies, etc. But the article offered another view – instead of lamenting the demise of BB as the small independently owned company we all knew and loved, we ought to be celebrating its influence on more mainstream, more environmentally calloused corporations…

As a somewhat wary greenie and also a generally suspicious person, I read this as sneaky marketing on Clorox’s part. Which it probably is. “Nice try, Clorox,” I thought to myself, “But I will continue to boycott BB lip balm in protest of your conniving business moves, even though BB lip balm is one of the best out there.”

But then as I thought about the article, I slowly changed my mind. Maybe the financial analysts are right – maybe we’re actually doing no one any favors by boycotting traditionally “bad” companies’ attempts at self-reform. So what if the self-reform still has to do with profit? The goal of environmentalism is not to make companies and their stockholders poor, but to save the planet. And in order the save the planet, we  need the big product and profit makers to cooperate. And to get them to cooperate, we need to get them to think that, yes, green products do sell better. Speak their language, so to speak.

It’s helpful now that it is actually cool and hip to be green. (No more dirty hippies. The contemporary greenie is a spritely 20-something who drives a fuel efficient sexy car and shops at Whole Foods.) Very very helpful. (I like to think that graphic design was at least partially to blame for this fortuitous turn of events.)

I’ve never thought about it this way before because I’ve always instinctively hated green marketing (most of it smacks of greenwashing). But you know what, if Clorox actually can reduce its environmental impact to zero (Ok scientists, get to work researching non-harmful bleach) and keep true to its word about heading towards greater responsibility… then good for it. Good for all of us.