Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
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The phone rang and I just stared at it. The last thing I needed now was another distraction. I tried to push it from my mind, gazing out the window at the trees and wildflowers, hoping to lose myself in the array of fall color in the woods around my house.
It rang again, and I got a vague but stirring image in my mind’s eye of a person needing to talk with me. Quickly I reached over and answered it.
“Hello.”
“It’s Bill, a familiar voice said. Bill was an agronomy expert who had been helping me with my garden. He lived down the ridge only a few hundred yards.
“Listen, Bill, can I call you back later?” I said. “I’ve got this deadline.”
“You haven’t met my daughter, Natalie, yet, have you?”
“Excuse me?”
No reply.
“Bill?”
“Listen,” he finally answered, “my daughter wants to talk with you. I think it might be important. I’m not quite sure how she knows, but she seems to be familiar with your work. She says she has some information about a place you’d be interested in. Some location in the north of Tibet? She says the people there have some important information.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
Bill chuckled on the other end of the line. She’s only fourteen, but she’s been saying some really interesting things lately. She was hoping she could talk with you this afternoon, before her soccer game. Any chance.”
I started to put him off, but the earlier image expanded and started to become clear in my mind. It seemed to be of the young girl and me talking somewhere near the big spring just up from her house.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “How about two p.m.?”
“That’s perfect,” Bill said.
On the walk over I caught sight of a new house across the valley on the north ridge. All in the last two years. I knew the word was out about the beauty of this bowl-shaped valley, but I really wasn’t worried that the place would become overcrowded or that the amazing natural vistas would be destroyed. Nestled right up next to a national forest, we were ten miles from the closest town—too far away for most people. And the family who owned this land and was now selling selected house sites on the outer ridges seemed determined to keep the serenity of the place unspoiled. Each house had to be low-slung and hidden amid the pines and sweet gums that defined the skyline.
What bothered me more was the preference for isolation exhibited by my neighbors. From what I could tell, most were characters of a sort, refugees from careers in various professions, who had carved out unique vocational niches that allowed them to now operate on flextime or travel on their own schedules as consultants—a freedom that was necessary if one was to live this far out in the wilderness.
The common bonds among all of us seemed to be a persistent idealism and the need to stretch our particular professions by an infusion of spiritual vision. Yet almost everyone in this valley stayed to themselves, content to focus on their diverse fields without much attention to community or the need to build on our common vision. This was especially true among those of different religious persuasions. For some reason, the valley had attracted people holding a wide range of beliefs, including Buddhism, Judaism, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and Islam. And while there was no hostility of any kind by one religious group toward another, there wasn’t a feeling of affinity either.
The lack of community concerned me because there were signs that a few of our kids were displaying some of the same problems seen in suburbia: too much time alone, too much video, and too much regard for the slights and put-downs at school. I was beginning to be concerned that there wasn’t enough family and community in their lives to push these peer problems into the background and keep them in proper perspective.
I stopped and looked out at the valley again. I knew that a new vision lay somewhere between these poles. It encompassed a belief in sustainable growth and humane technology, but only if pursued by an intuitive move toward the sacred, and an optimism based on spiritual vision of where the world can go.
The phone rang and I just stared at it
Cock Robin lay on his back with his feet in the air. A red breast feather twisted in the wind, his clove-brown wings folded like a dancer’s fan. It was seven minutes past six a.m. on the twenty-fourth day of May. He was dead.
Many robins have died without notice by the human race, but this was a particular robin, the Cock Robin of Saddleboro, and his death was a crisis.
At nine minutes past six on that memorable morning the telephone rang in the kitchen of 65 Elm Street and awoke Tony Isidoro, who was sleeping in his room at the top of the back steps. He uncurled all of his five feet three inches, put his feet on the floor, and shook his head. Slowly he ran his fingers through a crop of shining black hair. The phone jangled again and he stumbled downstairs to answer it. As he grabbed the receiver he tripped over his eighth-grade math book, which he had left on the floor by the kitchen door so he would remember it when he left for school. Kicking it sleepily aside, he mumbled “Hello.”
“Cock Robin is dead!” a voice exclaimed. Tony recognized Mary Alice Lamberty, the daughter of the wealthiest man in town. For a moment he did not answer.
“He’s dead!” she repeated, and this time he asked her how she knew.
“Mayor Joe just called my father,” she replied. “He accused Daddy of killing Cock Robin because our mill still dumps aniline dyes in the river. This is not true.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“You know perfectly well why I’m telling you. The Mayor gets all his information about robins from you and he’s going to ask you who killed Cock Robin. I know he will; and I just want you to know right now that if anyone murdered him, it was the Mayor with all his fancy garden sprays.”
Tony rubbed his eyes with his fist and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was about to say something, but Mary Alice hung up before he could collect his thoughts. He shrugged and went back to his room, picked up his field glasses, and focused them on Mayor Dambrowski’s lawn across the street.
There lay Cock Robin with his feet in the air.
Cock Robin lay on his back with his feet in the air
It was still dark when Judy woke up early the next morning. She found her flashlight and notebook. Then she tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen and started to save the world.
She hoped she could save the world before breakfast. Judy wondered if other people making the world a better place had to do it quietly, and in the dark, so their parents would not wake up.
She, Judy Moody, was in a Mr. Rubbish mood. Mr. Rubbish was the Good Garbage Gremlin in Stink’s comic book, who built his house out of French-fry cartons and pop bottles. He recycled everything, even lollipop sticks. And he never used anything from the rain forest.
Hmm…things that came from the rain forest. That would be a good place to start. Rubber came from the rain forest. And chocolate and spices and things like perfume. Even chewing gum.
Judy collected stuff from around the house and piled it on the kitchen table. Chocolate bars, brownie mix, vanilla ice cream. Her dad’s coffee beans. The rubber toilet plunger. Gum from Stink’s gumball machine. Her mom’s lipstick from the bottom of her purse. She was so busy saving the rain forest that she didn’t hear her family come into the kitchen.
“What in the world…?” Mom said.
“Judy, why are you in the dark?” Dad asked, turning on the lights.
“Hey, my gumball machine!” Stink said.
Judy held out her arms to block the way. “We’re not going to use this stuff anymore. It’s all from the rain forest,” she told them.
“Says who?” asked Stink.
“Says Mr. Rubbish. They cut down way too many trees to grow coffee and give us makeup and chewing gum.
My teacher, Mr. Todd, says the earth is our home. We have to take action to save it. We don’t need all this stuff.”
“I need gum!” yelled Stink. “Give me back my gum!”
“Stink! Don’t yell. Haven’t you ever heard of noise pollution?”
“Is my coffee in there?” Dad asked, rubbing his hair.
“Judy, is that ice cream? It’s dripping all over the table!” Mom carried the leaky carton over to the sink.
“ZZZZ-ZZZZZ!” Judy made the sound of a chain cutting down trees.
“She’s batty,” Stink said.
Dad put the brownie mix back in the cupboard. Mom took the toilet plunger off the kitchen table and headed for the bathroom.
Time for Plan B. Project R.E.C.Y.C.L.E. She, Judy Moody, would show her family just how much they hurt the planet.
It was still dark when Judy woke up early the next morning
At this point, I should explain what had happened to me since that summer day when I last hugged my dear and wise professor, and promised to keep in touch.
I did not keep in touch.
In fact, I lost contact with most of the people I knew in college, including my beer-drinking friends and the first woman I ever woke up with in the morning. The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York City, ready to offer the world his talent.
The world, I discovered, was not all that interested. I wandered around my early twenties, paying rent and reading classifieds and wondering why the lights were not turning green for me. My dream was to be a famous musician (I played piano), but after several years of dark, empty nightclubs, broken promises, bands that kept breaking up and producers who seemed excited about everyone but me, the dream soured. I was failing for the first time in my life.
At the same time, I had my first serious encounter with death. My favorite uncle, my mother’s brother, the man who had taught me music, taught me to drive, teased me about girls, thrown me a football—that one adult whom I targeted as a child and said, “That’s who I want to be when I grow up”—died of pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-four.
After my uncle’s funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time was suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough. No more playing music at half-empty nightclubs. No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear. I returned to school. I earned a master’s degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer. Instead of chasing my own fame, I wrote about famous athletes chasing theirs. I worked for newspapers and freelanced for magazines. I worked at a pace that knew no hours, no limits. I would wake up in the morning, brush my teeth, and sit down at the typewriter in the same clothes I had slept in. My uncle had worked for a corporation and hated it—same thing, every day—and I was determined never to end up like him.
I bounced around from New York to Florida, and eventually took a job in Detroit as a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. The sports appetite in that city was insatiable. In a few years, I was not only penning columns, I was writing sports books, doing radio shows, and appearing regularly on TV, spouting out my opinions on rich football players and hypocritical college sports programs. I was part of the media thunderstorm that now soaks out country. I was in demand.
I stopped renting. I started buying. I bought a house on a hill. I bought cars. I invested in stocks and built a portfolio. I was cranked to a fifth gear, and everything I did, I did on a deadline. I exercised like a demon. I drove my car at breakneck speed. I made more money that I had ever figured to see. I met a dark-haired woman named Janine who somehow loved me despite my schedule and the constant absences. We married after a sever-year courtship. I was back to work a week after the wedding, I told her—and myself—that we would one day start a family, something she wanted very much. But that never came.
Instead, I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things. I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died, like my uncle before me, which I figured was my natural fate.
As for my old professor, Morrie? Well, I thought about him now and then, the things he had taught me about “being human” and “relating to others,” but it was always in the distance, as if from another life. Over the years, I threw away any mail that came from Brandeis University, figuring they were only asking for money. So I did not know of Morrie’s illness. The people who might have told me were long forgotten, their phone numbers buried in some packed-away box in the attic.
It might have stayed that way, had I not been flicking through the TV channels late one night, when something caught my ear…
I considered myself, at seven, to be a consummate judge of make-believe beings. I judged Santa mildly absurd, the Easter Bunny, utterly pathetic, and the last time my parents suggested I place a lost molar under my pillow for the Tooth Fairy, my dad woke me up, screaming, in the middle of the night, a mousetrap dangling from his index finger. Yet there was one make-believe person who gave me some faith in adults’ imaginative abilities. This was the Garbage Man. I know I must have seen garbage trucks, and at school we actually used Dumpster bins. But when my loyalty to hard facts collided with my condescension toward make-believe beings, I somehow overshot the mark and created a little make-believe myself: I truly believed that once a week my father or my mother, and all American fathers or mothers, snuck out of the house, made off with their family’s loaded garbage can, emptied it somewhere (I didn’t much care where: it was just garbage), snuck the empty can back home and afterward claimed the entire operation had been affected by a grubby but otherwise Santa-like personage know as the Garbage Man.
What’s more, I actually liked this particular sham. In the first place, he was a man, not some obese, sleigh-driving elf or anthropomorphized rodent. In the second place, he charged cold hard cash for his services. Nobody ever stopped to thing of the billions of dollars, rupees, pesos, francs, lira or shekels that Santa and the like would need to practice their preposterous vocations. In the third place, all my parents ever did was complain about the G-Man—stuff like: “Boy, did that Garbage Man make a racket this morning! I thought I’d never get back to sleep!” Or “Can you believe it! The Garbage Man raised his prices again!” Or “When will that big bearded oaf learn not to thrown the lid right on top of our daffodils?” Though it was all, I believed, mere lies, I found the negative-campaign tactics wonderfully convincing. My parents’ endless carping actually caused me to conjure an illusory person I grew fond of: I pictured the Garbage Man as a big, heavy-bearded, robust, dirty lout who greeted all criticism with an ear-splitting guffaw, then roared, “You don’t like my noise? You don’t like my prices? Fine! Haul your own damn garbage!”
But in the spring of my seventh year, I moved from a little downstairs bedroom in the back of our house to a larger upstairs bedroom in the front of the house. And one warm April night I went to sleep, for the first time ever, with that bedroom’s street-facing window wide open. And very early the next morning—I’ll never forget: it was a Tuesday—I woke to the sound of singing robins, followed by the barking of dogs, followed by the roar of an engine and a loud, metallic clatter, so I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a huge filthy truck full of trash in the rear, and a burly young driver with a thick earth-brown beard, a can on his shoulder and a gait that appeared to be taking him swiftly, for such a large man, straight toward our very own garbage-filled can!
I raced downstairs and round to the back door, fumbled with the double lock and deadbolt, and by the time I’d poked my head out he had already emptied our little can into his big one and was striding away, humming some unrecognizable, garbagey tune. Afraid to call to him, afraid to let him know he’s been spied, I tore back up to my new bedroom, watched him empty trash into the back of his truck, stalk off across the street, steal the neighbor’s garbage just as he’d stolen our, return to the truck, hop up behind the wheel and roar off down the block in a rank blue cloud.
I’d seen the Garbage Man, all right. And the implications were limitless. But the place to begin, I figured, was where I’d always begun: with cool, verifiable facts. Vowing to keep what I’d seen secret—lest I be scoffed by skeptics (especially myself)—I vowed to look into the Garbage Man facts and face them. To face them even if they proved, for once, to be not grim, but wonderful.
I considered myself, at seven, to be a consummate judge of make-believe beings.
