I am the proud owner of a push mower, the kind that relies on people power instead of a motor.
My transformation started with a white lie; an exaggeration of sorts. The kind you may boast, as I did, among old friends in a pub.
The conversation had turned, as it often does these days, to global warming. I had just seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth on The Movie Network. I was riveted to the film. I believed every word. It all made sense to me. I think it was all those graphs. You can’t really argue with graphs.
But my friends, a couple of whom aren’t as inclined as I would be to hug a tree, weren’t as flattering about Mr. Gore’s documentary.
One colleague, whose suspicion of environmentalists comes honestly through her father‘s career as a forester for the Ministry of Natural Resources, shut off Gore’s flick after watching for 10 minutes.
I guess she doesn’t like graphs as much as I do.
She accused Gore of using the Boogie Man of Global Warming for partisan political purposes, not in some honourable endeavour to save the world.
I just didn’t see it. This guy has been crusading against this stuff since he was in college.
“Well,” I blurted out, a little slighted by my friend’s characterization of Gore’s intentions. “It was so heartbreaking, what we’re doing to this world, that it nearly brought me to tears.”
That’s when another dear old friend said, “Oh yeah, what are you doing about it?”
She caught me off guard. That, of course, was the point of Gore’s film. Turning this around means we’ll all have to inconvenience ourselves in some way by conserving energy.
What was I doing to help out? In that moment, I couldn’t come up with anything really significant — really worthwhile — that I was doing to stop this Global Warming thing.
Visions of David Suzuki wagging his finger at me danced in my head. Then it came to me; that extremely good intentioned, absolutely harmless little lie.
“I use a push mower,” I said.
As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. After all, it wasn’t really true, at least not then. I had fully intended to get a push mower at the time but hadn’t gotten around to it.
My friends seemed so impressed that I would go through such personal pain to help end Global Warming that I let the little lie slide.
They could see how using a push mower truly was an inconvenience. They wouldn’t do it.
In their eyes, I was already walking the walk.
Of course, I felt a little guilty when I thought about my white lie later. But I convinced myself that I had only delayed the truth.
Last weekend, I finally made good on my statement. I’m now the only guy on the street, probably the only guy in my neighbourhood, who doesn’t burn fossil fuels when he’s cutting his lawn.
The Union of Concerned Scientists would be proud of me.
Here’s what the website eartheasy.com says about lawn mowers and global warming: Yard maintenance contributes significantly to greenhouse emissions. Per hour of operation, a power lawn mower emits 10-12 times as much hydrocarbon as a typical auto. A weedeater emits 21 times more and a leaf blower 34 times more.
That’s reason enough. But what I like the most about push mowers is that they’re a lot quieter than the gas-guzzling version. I wish my neighbours would switch to push power too.
Don’t you hate it when you kick back on the deck with your favourite beverage and suddenly the annoying whine of a lawn mower rips away the soothing silence?
Now that’s inconvenient.
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