Greener Than Thou

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After Grezzo, our attitude toward greening is best encapsulated by the Clear Conscience Café, a place that offers fair trade coffee and a sustainable approach to business, while loudly announcing its purity to everyone within a one-mile radius. Inside, over the counter, a wall bears a quote from Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” The proximity of the quote to the counter provides maximum bang for the buck. Customers get to buy organic, shade-grown, fair trade java in recycled cups and then, transaction complete, can turn to this quote and genuflect to their own moral rectitude. “My conscience is clear,” the purchase announces. “I am the change I want to see in the world.” Taking part in supposedly enlightened commerce might seem like a progressive gesture, but in reality, it’s chiefly defensive, with roots in the Puritan psychology.

When the Puritans came to the New World, they were quickly stricken with a case of buyers’ remorse. While they wallowed in mud, trying to establish their ill-fated “Commonwealth of Saints,” their fellow Puritans back home were mixing it up on the battlefield in the climax of the Reformation. “The founders of Puritan New England had to contend almost immediately with an articulated sense, both from abroad and from their own ranks, that they were missing the main event,” write Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco in The Puritans in America. “Defensiveness was a part of New England’s initiation.”

It still is. Nowadays we may be going green with gusto, but for the legions of converts, much of the urgency comes from remorse of not having done enough in the past, when West Coast cities were eating our free-range lunch as they recycled their soiled diapers and took pains not to intentionally maim cyclists. Out of a sense of responsibility, Bostonians muster the discipline to try to reverse the damage caused by their reckless forebears. But they’re also compelled to broadcast that fact, because they can’t tolerate someone thinking, even for one moment, that they’re not fully righteous themselves.

The stakes are high, after all. Seldom is the issue of eco-consciousness raised without terrifying images of the apocalypse, when ice caps finally collapse into the sea and emaciated polar bears flung limply skyward by the force of the cataclysm start crashing onto cars and houses. But the Puritans gave us a predecessor to this sort of Day After Tomorrow disaster porn, too. Out of fear they had misread God’s will by coming here, many American Puritans concocted the idea that New England was, in fact, the most important place on earth. God would use it as a staging point for the end times, giving its saintly inhabitants front-row seats to the glorious rapture while their compatriots across the pond tore each other to shreds. (Who’s missing the main event now?!) Consequently, the Puritans were obsessed with the coming end of the world, and many trembled with glee at the prospect of being vindicated in the eyes of those who doubted how right they were all along.

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