Feeling Good and Guilty on the Eco-Home Tour

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Julia is happy to show us Eco-Home, the Los Feliz house she’s been living in since the ’70s. With her is Judy, a young and pretty brunette who does home energy audits and who acts sort of as Julia’s TA. First we go to her neighbor’s yard, the better to see her solar panels. We stand a while in the punishing sun, not making a peep, for our sins. Then we step under her golden medallion trees and admire the lush, shady yard she waters as often as twice a year. There are Australian Seuss-like things, a lantana that volunteered, and yellow blossoms underfoot. We are pointed toward the paint on the house—pretty, rich plum and eggplant, a red door for proper feng shui—and told it has low or no VOCs (volatile organic compounds), which are used to keep the paint liquid in the can, and are responsible for something like four percent of air pollution in the city of LA.

I am liking the Eco-Home tour!

Soon we are sitting in Julia’s cool and comfortable living room, and she is showing us cellophanes for our windows, and talking ’bout caulking for our home heating and cooling. We have already introduced ourselves as kind of lame people who would like to do good as long as it’s no inconvenience. But this one, I can put away. “Oh, I don’t use heating or air conditioning,” I murmur, and my boyfriend says the same. Julia is taken aback; she must feel as if she’s on the spot, as if her years of toil and intelligent solutions to minimize her impact on the earth and the city were for naught. She starts stammering that she’s an old lady, a “wimp,” who must temper her indoor habitat with the judicious use of energy (which, again, she gets from the sun). Meanwhile, I rent a house that was built in 1923, and is perfectly tooled to handle the L.A. heat. And in the winter? I put on socks and four blankets, and freeze to death. No worries, Julia, you are 73 and ride only a bike or public transportation. I am 36, and today I drove a car (with internal combustion) seven-tenths of a mile and back. I promise you, you win.

Hell, I still haven’t even properly inflated my tires.

There is a period of time in her living room when I get angry with Julia, who is a beautiful lady of silver hair, trim figure, and unlined pink skin. She has begun talking to us about why she became an environmentalist, and the reason includes native Americans and the Gaia Hypothesis, and I am beginning to feel cornered. I took the Eco-Home tour because I want to see neat shit! I want to find cool solutions! That are easy-to-do and won’t inconvenience me! I am fearing we are in for some Scientology-style proselytizing, when all we wanted was our free Personality Test. I look at her and give monosyllabic answers to her friendly questions, until at last she grabs a box of compact fluorescent bulbs to show us. “Oh, yes, I have those,” I say, and turn to my boyfriend. “Do you?” He does, and we are off to the kitchen.

In the kitchen, Judy takes over, and we learn about asking for previously used wood at the lumber yard, and we have long and interesting conversations about linoleum, which is actually made from solidified linseed oil rather than the vinyl stickums we think of as linoleum. Of course, once the vinyl came out, all the American companies stopped making actual linoleum, and so now you have to source it from a European company. “Which makes it more expensive ...” I interrupt, know-it-all-ily. “Which makes it a bigger carbon footprint,” Judy gently explains.

We are on to cleaning products, and I ask about my Trader Joe’s dish soap that has no suds. I have read that the bubbles in shampoo are only there to make you think there’s more cleaning action; is it the same in dish soaps? It is! In fact, it’s a useless but possibly harmful chemical called sodium laureth sulfate. So am I imagining that my pots are still greasy after I wash them in my Trader Joe’s? Judy hasn’t heard of a Trader Joe’s dish soap that doesn’t sud up. I am probably just not using enough. We talk about plastics and dioxin. We have a fine old time.

Soon it is time to go back into Julia’s garden, a place of otherworldly tomatoes and purple string beans that look like gnarled monster fingers; she chose purple so her old eyes would have an easier time spotting the beans against the vine. There are zucchinis the size of babies, and apple and apricot trees, and a figsplosion. We talk about composting, and how to keep slugs away (a drip irrigation system buried beneath the soil keeps the top couple inches dry and unfriendly to sluglife). Healthy, well-composted plants can fend off aphids and whitefly like rest, good nutrition and exercise can fend off a cold.

And here is where I feel guilty. Sure, I don’t heat or cool my home, and I use cloth bags, and I keep my computer and TV on power strips and then turn them off at night (my electric bill was cut in half when I finally figured that one out), but the water. I water a stupid, ugly lawn supposedly twice a week (the ancient automatic timer no longer lets you pause it while it’s raining, and has taken to mysteriously starting up an extra evening or two a week) for like an hour, at a rate of a gallon or two per minute. And it’s still brown and dry and gross, and I don’t want to use all this water in a desert and I hurt inside and am guilty and sad. I would like to do something about it, but it’s not my lawn, it’s my landlady’s lawn, a landlady who’s actually put in some pretty cool water-saving devices (a button in the bathroom directs the cold water standing in the pipes back into the water heater and flushes out new hot water for you, so you don’t waste it waiting for the shower to heat up), but GAH, that is not going to offset the one million gallons of water I am pouring over this stupid yard that doesn’t even give food! Oh, landlady, can’t we please kill the lawn?

I don’t feel guilty for driving, though. It’s L.A. Get over it.

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