Mother Talkers

The Ecomama Movement

by tarantula

Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 09:26:14 AM PDT

According to the New York Times today, the Ecomom party is replacing the more traditional, tupperware party.

Move over, Tupperware. The EcoMom party has arrived, with its ever-expanding "to do" list that includes preparing waste-free school lunches; lobbying for green building codes; transforming oneself into a "locovore," eating locally grown food; and remembering not to idle the car when picking up children from school (if one must drive). Here, the small talk is about the volatile compounds emitted by dry-erase markers at school.

An assortment of experts are noticing that moms are the driving force behind much environmentalism. For instance:

At last year’s Step It Up rallies, a day of environmental demonstrations across the country, the largest group of organizers were "mothers concerned about the disintegrating environment for their children," said Bill McKibben, a founder of the event and author of "The End of Nature."

And ecomoms like myself are consulting grist.org and heeding the warnings of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. There are a few interesting facts in the article, as well as some personal stories.

My problem with the article is that it trivializes the the movement, and equates it with "trendiness" like tupperware. I like two words from it, "ecoanxiety" and "locovore", and it captures much of what we talk about her at MotherTalkers, but it's quite a fluffy slant.

What do you think, is environmental consciousness just a trend/temporary fad? Or is it a real movement getting a lot of momentum from smart, tuned-in mothers?

Tags: ecomama, grist, global warming, tupperware, Al Gore (all tags)

Permalink | 44 comments

  • Definitely trendy (0 / 0)

    Everyone seems to be trying to outdo everyone else in bleating their green creds.  Tacky.  I've been invited to these so-called "ecomom" parties a lot recently.  Funny.  When I tried to get a group of moms together to do something ecologically sound or even just to learn about options, they couldn't be bothered.  Now that it's hip--Getcher ironic organic t-shirt now!--some of these same moms are now hosting their own little eco parties.  

    If there was actually learning being done, I'd probably be a bit more excited.  For example, one party was at a vegan/raw restaurant.  All 9 of us took separate cars to get there, circling the block to look for parking.  We get there and the first salesperson (I refuse to call her presenter) was trying to sell us makeup.  None of us even wear makeup.  It was all organically made of course, but the lady got flustered when I mentioned all the packaging.  "But it's recycled and the plastic is made of biodegradable cornstarch!"  Who cares? It was unnecessary packaging.  The second person had organic hemp t-shirts complete with hipsterized sayings.  Yawn.  The 3rd person was a little better, he actually mentioned all the everyday stuff you can do, the same stuff I'd been telling these women for years (most of us went to school together).

    But still, even back in school, these same people have told me that I was a bore with my "eco-madness".  One lady still leaves ALL the lights in her house on (one of the reasons she was kicked out of a shared apt.), but her excuse is "I've CFLs now.  It's okay."  Sure, there may be moms out there who are looking to save a bit of money and a few who really do care about the environment, but just from looking at mommy blogs, most of them just want to have something to brag about.

    Blogging While Brown Convention Atlanta, GA July 25-27, 2008

    by fabooj on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 01:00:57 PM PDT

    • Huh! I've never heard of these (0 / 0)

      parties until reading this article. You make them sound as fluffy as this article describes them.

      Yeah, I'm more into getting together to do some research and solve real problems, like upcoming energy crises, etc.

      Competitive ecomom wars as you describe definitely sound trendy. I wish that environmentalism in general could be trendy, too, but until hurricane Katrinas stop happening and science stops documenting global warming problems, I'm afraid it has to be a movement. But this article does signify that it's finally stylish to be ecogroovy, not plain Jane syndrome anymore.

      by tarantula on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:21:55 PM PDT

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  • confused (0 / 0)

    Hmm..

    I'm confused...are these really parties?  Or some sort of get-togethers?  Parties where they sell stuff, which isn't very eco?

    I think moms are prime for worrying about all things eco.  Just think, one more thing to be anxious about!  Yes!  Not saying most of it isn't real..

    I think I could skip being the hostess of this Eco-mom party..

    At the EcoMom party recently, some guests took the hostess, Liz Held, to task for her wall-to-wall carpeting (potential off-gassing), her painted walls (unhealthful volatile organic compounds) and the freshly cut flowers that she had set out for the occasion (not organic). Their problems with the S.U.V. in the driveway were self-explanatory.

    Sounds positively awful!

    by NJmom on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 03:28:41 PM PDT

    • Super critical (0 / 0)

      guests can suck it.

      Nobody is perfect, or you'd live under a rock and eat nothing but acorns in your one burlap sack. If Al Gore was a saint with the smallest carbon footprint possible, nobody would have ever heard of him...he'd be too busy not flying and not driving anywhere.

      I could never host one of these either.

      by tarantula on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:25:12 PM PDT

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    • That caught my eye too (0 / 0)

      Eco or not-there is no excuse for being rude to your hostess.  Also, if she moved into a house that already has wall-to-wall and paint on the walls isn't it more environmentally harmful to remove the stuff?  WTF?

      by music teacher on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 08:03:06 PM PDT

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  • I'm of decidedly mixed views (0 / 0)

    on the one hand, great. The message of being conscious is getting out, and being "eco" is now cool. On the other hand, my good ol' Yankee/Norwegian blood gets angry and gets amused. I mean, if we're truly going to get into being eco-conscious, that ultimately means, you know, consuming less! There's an inherent paradox to Conspicuous Greeness; it is impossible to buy yourself into this label.

    As a statement of personhood, I do a lot of the things that are now considered cool, and a lot of it comes from my upbringing. We wore a lot of thrift shop clothing, my mother kept a veg garden in our backyard (until she had to go back to work full-time), we only had one car growing up and my sister and I walked and biked as many places as possible, lights were always switched off and the temperature was always kept low in the house. But most of these were done for economic reasons; my parents are career non-profit people, and they saved considerably for house improvements, the mortgage, our college education and their retirement. As such, we didn't have much to be wasteful with! It wasn't a trend, it was a fact of life!

    Now I find myself doing a lot of the same things; we only have one car, we live around the corner from public transport, I grow veg in our backyards, I turn lights off obsessively, keep the heat and airconditioning low, compost food scraps, recycle, yadda yadda yadda. So I guess the rest of the world has caught up with those of us who, 10 to 15 years ago, would have been hopelessly unchic. But who really cares?

    by Rachel on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 04:59:17 PM PDT

    • I'm down with you Rachel (0 / 0)

      (seems like I always am). I come from a similar background and do similar things in my own life. I saw this article this morning and it made me snort (don't know why I read it in fact - I knew it would tick me off). The thing that bugged me the most was that this has been relegated to being a "mom" thing now, which just somehow seems demeaning to me, kind of like the term "soccer mom."

      In our house, everyone contributes to the effort, and I'm not the one who makes all these decisions. My DH was the one who decided to hang up laundry lines in the basement!

      I have a great friend from work who actually belongs to the Junior League (which is a whole other story in and of itself). She's trying to get them to adapt environmentalism as their next platform. I admire her efforts, but my concern is that what they do would turn out to be like what the women in this article are doing - driving their big cars someplace where they can hear about more stuff they need to buy.

      by mpg on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:26:51 PM PDT

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      • Irony, (0 / 0)

        driving hours or flying to learn more about the hazards of global warming and peak oil.

        by tarantula on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:30:56 PM PDT

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      • whole family buy-in (0 / 0)

        is so key. I've spent the majority of the past 2 years convincing DH that we can and should install water tanks in our backyard, for example. Had to find some aesthetically pleasing models that fit in our tight courtyard and had to make the case for why we need them. It's finally worked, due to my research and the fact that we're in terrible drought conditions. So now that DH is on board, he's going to install them himself, saving us heaps. Who-hoo!

        I agree with - we need some rugged, manly man angle here to get the blokes to come on board!

        by Rachel on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:37:42 PM PDT

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        • Yes! (0 / 0)

          It shouldn't just be an excuse for more shopping. That's no longer gonna work.

          Manly men (and macho women, too) should be able to get cool, green jobs and use their tinkering, engineering, thinking, building abilities to make communities better and decentralize electricity production and stuff. It shouldn't just be about moms worrying about their kids and looking for greener makeup options, as Fabooj describes above.

          by tarantula on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:45:31 PM PDT

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          • you're right (0 / 0)

            like you and your community members building the playground. But it seems to me that so much needs to change, culturally - like this crazy working environment that keeps us all spinning like hampsters on wheels!

            Personally, my thinking is evolving like this: globalization is never going away, and we have to face up to the fact that there are 5bn people on the planet, a significant slice of whom are going to get better and better educated. Instead of running around trying to work longer hours and harder hours to maintain what we have, I think we need to simplify and come back a bit. It's not an agrarian, utopian vision, but rather one that says, hey, maybe 40 hours a week and a garden with veg at home ain't such a bad thing!

            by Rachel on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 06:52:38 PM PDT

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            • Frankly, I think (0 / 0)

              globalization is going away, unless technology makes some pretty amazing break-throughs. I have no idea how soon or how gradual, but it seems the world is going to be much bigger than it is now, due to peak oil specifically (and a lost ability to jump on planes or use the car on a whim).

              This isn't a bad thing, considering it would help put a check on global warming (unless we unwisely resort to coal). That's one of the reasons I like Shenanigans post about trains so much. Trains are cool.

              by tarantula on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 07:10:36 PM PDT

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    • Yeah, it seems (0 / 0)

      like a good sign that this is finally considered cool, but it might be too little too late, really.

      You are doing amazing things, I must say. I'm always impressed with all your eco-grooviness and energy to keep it up.

      by tarantula on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:28:36 PM PDT

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      • I've said it before and I'll say it again (0 / 0)

        I have the time to do these things because a.) I only have one child so far; and b.) I work from home. Because I don't have a commute, I gain an automatic 45 minutes in the morning and in the afternoon, so I have time to do things like garden, compost, yadda yadda yadda. I don't think I'd regress if I went back to work full time out of the house, because most of it is just routine now, but I'd be hard pressed to do other things that are on the agenda.

        So don't give me a lot of credit here; I really admire two-parent, full-time out-of-the-house workers who manage to do all these things.

        by Rachel on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 05:35:14 PM PDT

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        • give yourself some credit, girl (0 / 0)

          We are a two working parent family but that doesn't mean we don't have our downtime.  And we are not using it nearly as productively as you do.  That's a fact and you ARE awesome.  Big props from here (where you would find me reclining, blogging, reading the Sunday paper, and bossing DS around, while mentally preparing to take him shopping, which is Sisyphean).

          by mamacita on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 12:17:18 PM PDT

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    • Exactly (0 / 0)

      I wrote about this over at Truth and Progress.  You read on this eco-blogs, "How do we reach out to poor people?" and I always say, "They're already doing this stuff because they're poor.  But the young hipsterized urbanite who is just now getting on the bandwagon, is thinking that they're doing it wrong because they don't care an organic tote to the store.

      This whole subject is something of a sore spot for me.  I've been exhorting my friends to live frugally and leave a light touch on the earth forever and now that there's a marketing label, my email is being inundated with pleas for me to buy more eco-friendly crap I don't need to save the environment.  For a group of people who thrive on irony, this one is just lost on them.

      Blogging While Brown Convention Atlanta, GA July 25-27, 2008

      by fabooj on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 12:28:48 PM PDT

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      • hey, savor the fact (0 / 0)

        that for once, people like us are trendy. We weren't uncool a decade ago - we were the vanguard.

        by Rachel on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 01:59:36 PM PDT

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      • There should be a thrift store (0 / 0)

        shopping movement, not a "new stuff" movement of any sort. Things need to be used longer, that's all there is to it. Or even better, there should be a movement that makes reducing your carbon footprint easier and pay off, not a big sacrifice.

        Thanks a lot for your input, fabooj, because the irony back atcha from the poor is pretty incredible. No wonder they're so insulted at people who purposely try to pare down to a carbon footprint that doesn't even come close to their lifestyle. For example, buying new, ecogroovy crap doesn't match riding public transport sytem every day of your life, eh?

        There's some business guy I heard about who is getting poor, inner city people on the environmentalism bandwagon by transforming it into a green job creation movement for them, like by retrofitting city buildings for earthquakes and green energy, jobs that can't be outsourced. That's the way to get people interested, not ecoparties with catalogues of biodegradable junk. Has anyone heard more about this guy? I think he's in San Francisco.

        by tarantula on Mon Feb 18, 2008 at 07:30:31 AM PDT

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  • The University where I work (0 / 0)

    has an MS in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing and the community I live in was among the first to sign up for the 10% reduction challenge.  I guess that we were green here for so long (as a community) that this is less of a factor for us.  This whole thing seems odd to me.

    by Laura on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 03:57:40 AM PDT

  • :) Well, they need more "stuff" (0 / 0)

    and trendy "green" stuff?  All the better.  LOL.  Instant Environmentalist, just add consumerism.

    Humbug.

    Nearly a decade ago, DH and i were talking about how many kids to have (a discussion we've had before, here) and the benefits of cloth diapering and such.  We bike instead of drive if possible.  So, this "hop on the bandwagon" cool thing is kind of irritatiing.

    However, I do like that cloth diapers have become easier to get and that I can buy sustainably produced cosmetics...I really do.  Hell, the company I bought my bike from started making the kid-capable version of the cargo bike, in part, due to the growing demand for such things.

    What do you mean, uh-oh? Toddler & baby pictures

    by round peg inna square hole on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 08:13:48 AM PDT

    • not to say that eco stuff doesn't have a role (0 / 0)

      in that if we need to consume, it might as well be stuff that is a bit lighter on the carbon footprint.

      I love the cloth-vs-disposable debate because it's a perfect example of the uncertainties of what is "green" or "eco." For example, here in Melbourne, we're in the grips of a multi-year drought. Our reservoir capacity is at 36% full, and we're on stage 3a water restrictions. This means we can water outdoors twice a week for two hours each day, car washing is banned, existing pools can't be topped up from mains, new pools can't be filled at all (heh. heh. heh.), etc., etc. The government has good incentives for installing water tanks, there are discounts for buying efficient appliances, etc.

      So what is the more environmentally responsible path - cloth diapers and extra loads of wash in a time when water is a vanishing resource? Disposable diapers that take up landfill? It's an interesting debate.

      [FWIW, With Jess, she's in disposables and is in the throes of potty training. With the next one (touch wood), I'll probably go a combo of cloth nappies with those disposable middle inserts during the day (I've found ones that are made of recycled paper), and disposables at night.]

      by Rachel on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 01:58:22 PM PDT

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  • Didn't resonate with me (0 / 0)

    I consider myself pretty environmentally conscious, and I thought I would love this article when I saw it in the NYT.  As it turns out, I didn't even get to the second page. I didn't relate at all to their "method" of environmentalism, which some have commented on earlier.

    I'm planning to read the Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices. From what I've heard, this book is good at breaking down the things "worth" focusing on vs. those that don't make a difference.  From what I've heard about the book, it concludes that how you diaper your kid is irrelevant, but how much you drive and what you eat is hugely relevant.  So I think I'll just stay home and be a vegetarian who uses disposable diapers.  I'll let you know what I think of it when I get around to reading it.

    by Treena on Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 03:29:32 AM PDT

  • When I think of sharing "eco-product" ideas (0 / 0)

    I remember that every time I use my cloth or nylon bags for shopping, people tell me what a great idea it is.  I have had the same durable canvas handle bags in use since 1995. I say, give reusable bags as gifts and get them into the hands of people who will use them instead of plastic sacks.

    An excellent online store is Reusable Bags and I particularly like the Reisenthel compact bag.  Reusable water bottles are great, too!

    These are just a couple of things that help me feel more eco-conscious than the average mom around town.  And my kids are on board with it, too!

    Suzi

    by MsMarvel on Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 10:01:51 AM PDT

    • There should be a money cost (0 / 0)

      on plastic bags, to make them extinct here. Aren't they considered totally tasteless and thoughtless in Ireland or somewhere, partly because they started charging 33 cents per bag? A Siegel or somebody diaried it at Kos...

      Reusable bags are a good idea.

      by tarantula on Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 11:07:56 AM PDT

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      • considering similar measures in Australia (0 / 0)

        currently, there's been a huge public awareness campaign to get people to use "green bags" - the reusable ones - and it's dramatically lowered the useage of plastic bags (no figures, but I could look). There's talk of a ban on plastic bags altogether now, or at least a tax a la Ireland (fwiw, the levy was 5 euro cents per bag, not 33 cents!). Still, an extra 5 cents per bag was enough to cut usage.

        by Rachel on Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 03:07:05 PM PDT

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