My Green Romance

By Autumn Lovell on February 12, 2010 From Restoration campaign

My husband and I both come from small town America. I’m from Boulder, Montana and he’s from a ranch somewhere outside Joseph, Oregon. We tell childhood stories that center around the wild places near our homes… rivers, mountainsides and flower-filled meadows provide a dramatic backdrop to our personal histories. Anyone who’s ever talked to either of us for more than a few moments will quickly realize it is that love of outdoor living which has shaped us both into the people we are today.

By the time we met, however, our living arrangements had drastically changed. I was a young single mother living in Eugene, Oregon - extremely busy with my toddler son, two jobs, and a full-time schedule at the local community college. I barely had time for anything but work, yet was passionate about the environment, and worked with both the Sierra Club and OSPIRG on various local and international campaigns. I still loved the outdoors, but hadn’t even dipped one little toe in a quiet creek for several years.

Then I started spotting this country guy around my neighborhood.

I found myself drawn to the cowboy in a baseball cap, something that I think happens to a lot of small town girls. My curiosity was peaked when I discovered that he too came from a town no-one had heard of, which he’d escaped the moment he was old enough to drive. We had a whirlwind romance, falling in love the way you’re supposed to do it - as though neither of us had been brutally crushed by the past.

We’re still in love to this day.

It’s eight years later and we have an amazing and chaotic family.  People often look at our relationship and ask, “How do you keep it all together?” Well let me tell you, it’s no simple task. Just like in any relationship, however, we found strength in the things we shared in common, and in the compromises we were willing to make for each other.

Our small town experiences shaped us differently. I have the soul of a hippy; I can remember from a very young age that the well being of the creatures around me was a major concern of mine. As a child I would weep when stung by a bee, not because of the pain in the bottom of my foot, but because I knew the bee had died. I remember talking to trees, and spacing my footsteps carefully to avoid my “favorite” patches of grass in our back yard… I didn’t want to injure the little plants beneath my clumsy footfalls.  At the time I thought everyone felt the same about nature.  I was wrong, and of course even I outgrew this absurdly eccentric attachment to my surroundings… but I never stopped caring about nature.

My husband grew up in the farthest northeastern corner of Oregon, in Wallowa county along Hells Canyon. He describes it as, “follow highway 89 to Joseph, Oregon. Keep driving ‘till the road turns to dirt. Drive down that dirt road until you’re pretty sure you’re headed nowhere… and you’re probably right around the corner from Grandpa Lovell’s ranch.” As the offspring of several generations of ranchers and loggers, my husband loves the outdoors. He’s hunted, fished, farmed, and shaped the land since the moment he was old enough to walk, and he’s proud to carry on a tradition of hard-working country guys.

As you can see, although our environments were similar, my husband and I had very different experiences, and although we both love nature, we have formed our relationships with the outdoors in very different ways.

These differences became more accentuated as our romance flourished. My husband was responsible for re-introducing me to rivers, and I am responsible for teaching him how to embrace his role as a caretaker. It wasn’t easy.

When I returned to the rivers I was devastated. Places that I remembered as nearly untouched were overrun by piles of trash and partially decayed poached animals. Shotgun shells littered the fields that I remembered navigating so carefully in my bare feet as a small child. Partially stripped and bullet riddled cars lined the area between camp and the local stream. Clear-cut landscapes of forests, monocultures harvested in stages so that a local timber giant could reap the benefits, had replaced the wild forests I remembered. 

Each time we arrived at camp I experienced a little heartbreak. I could not believe the vistas that greeted me, full of devastated forests that looked more like a golf-course from above than the forests of my childhood.

Together, my family and I worked to restore these places to the way I remembered them, hoping our work would survive the weeks before our next visit to camp. We did this, not because we had a deep scientific understanding of the impact of litter on our planet, or of bullet lead in the soil. We did it simply because we wanted our little piece of outdoor heaven to be clean and safe for our children and ourselves.

It was this simple restoration effort that brought us together, and helped us to find compromises, which blended my hippy mentality with his working-guy ethic. Finding a compromise for the outdoors was easy; it included little decisions like:
- picking up bullet shells
- carrying in and OUT our targets when we went shooting
- carefully packing in and out all the garbage we generated during our stay
- keeping on the trails while playing with our four-wheelers and bikes
- and just generally minimizing our family’s impact on the forest in every way we could manage.

Finding a workable compromise for our city lifestyle was a bit more difficult. It wasn’t impossible however, and we were able to make several decisions as a couple that helped improve our impact without either of us having to give up too much of our comfortable American lifestyle. First, nothing comes into our house without being used several times before it is officially recycled, composted, or discarded. Everything from a butter dish to a tattered cloth diaper can be used over and over again around the house. Decisions like this are the easy ones, they fit my hippy urge to re-use everything in sight, and they aligned well with my husband’s country sensibility.

We never buy bottled water. My husband uses a thermos at work, rather than buy and discard a new contribution to the trash each day - he finds that the re-usable thermos holds up better on a job site than a thin plastic bottle anyway. The few remnant plastic bottles around my house have been there for many many weeks, and often we’ll buy one set of water jugs for our first camping trip of the season and then refill and recycle them all year long. We aren’t officially off th plastic diet, but we’re trying not to buy into the ultra-disposable “everything” mentality.

We dress our kids, and sometimes ourselves in hand-me-downs. It’s so simple it’s absurd, and in the end my husband is willing to let me shop more often at the second-hand stores because I’m saving money and our kids still look great! I get to satisfy my shopping urges, my husband gets to satisfy his budget, and our family gets the comfort of knowing we’ve done one less thing to hurt the planet.

We only have one family vehicle, and we try and use it for a tool and for a toy rather than for our daily transportation. What does that mean? It means that I bus to work and everywhere else I need to go, I only drive when I’m going to be picking up several people or have to carry a heavy load of groceries somewhere. I find that more than 90% of my weekly activities don’t have to involve a vehicle at all, and so I am reducing my dependence on fossil fuels every time I step onto public transportation. We do drive when we go camping and on family trips of course, this is when our vehicle is a toy, and I feel that we can make these journeys with a cleaner conscience knowing that we’ve driven it much less than the average family during the rest of the week.

The final major adjustment we’ve made around our home is the switch to energy-efficient lighting and appliances. I think this is probably one of my husband’s favorite green choices. Every time we can afford to upgrade to a newer appliance our electric bill goes down, something he loves, and I doubt there’s a man in the U.S. who wouldn’t find it amusing to have a wife who asks for things like a low-flow toilet as an anniversary gift!

When my husband and I met we were typical Americans focused on the ins and outs of surviving everyday life. In many ways we still are, but now that we’ve found each other and built a family, we’ve got a keen eye turned toward the future. We don’t just make the house payment and assume that’s enough to ensure our childrens’ safety. If we want true security for them we’ve got to work towards restoring the wild ecosystems of our planet, and reducing the impact of our cities. We’ve got to teach them to tread lightly on this earth.

My husband and I have made these changes together, and we’re working to spread these small decisions beyond the confines of our home by talking to our friends and family members about the choices we’ve made and why we’ve made them.

My romance has made my life greener, and as you embark upon Valentine’s festivities this week, I hope you remember that although red is the color of passion and love… green is the color of life!

This was My Green Romance, an entry in our Restoration Campaign from February 12, 2010. It was filed under Forest and Rangeland.

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