How Deep Self-Care Can Save the Planet

On a certain November morning last year, the sky outside my window turned red and the sun didn’t come out. That day I decided I wanted to sell my car. In a strange way, it seemed like an ultimate act of self-care.

Mind you, my wife and I are a two-car family yet neither of us commute in the traffic-clogged Bay Area. So losing a car wouldn’t be a hardship. Instead, it would be a frank statement of living my values. A way to stage my own protest and live true. Did I actually give up my car after that fateful day, however? No, I did not. But I have maintained a habit of walking wherever I can, which has turned out to cover most of my pandemic-era meanderings.

Still, this whole conversation helped me realize what my friend John was all about.

I knew John some years ago when I lived in the Adirondacks, and he was a career environmentalist. And instead of driving everywhere, he rode his bike everywhere 365 days of the year.  Up and over mountains. In the pouring rain. All the way to the grocery store and back, many miles away. Way more than I have walked on my few errands every week, in other words.

I’ll never forget seeing a blurry smudge up ahead on the road one snowy day. There was John, gamely pedaling his way up a hill in a snowstorm. At the time, I thought he was nuts. Maybe even a little dramatic.

Now I think he is wise and admirable. Because even back then, John really got it. We are truly living in an emergency.

This is why creating a lower-consumption, greener life with a smaller carbon footprint is the next arc of my own self-care. For what is true self-care but returning to the often-quiet whisperings of your own internal voice? Turns out, she’s been asking for this for quite a while.

All it took for me to turn this switch was waking up to that strange, dark Oakland morning. I looked at the clock and it was well past 8AM. Yet my entire bedroom was as dark as if it were 2AM.

I sat up, confused and uncertain. I suspected historic wildfire pollution in the upper atmosphere from was responsible… but this was extreme. What the hell was going on?

I took out the sleepy dog, who was equally befuddled. When I tried to rouse our urban chickens, they wouldn’t emerge. Instead, they stayed on their nests, clucking quietly and believing, like me, it was still the middle of the night. I walked out into the front yard and looked around. The sky was a weird dystopian orange, and I looked at it bleakly. That’s when I became completely and totally afraid. Clearly, the world was seriously broken… and if I didn’t get it before, I sure as hell did now.

I began to cry. All of California was now burning or severely polluted, freak acts of nature were now the norm, and I felt smaller and more powerless than ever.

The dreaded future we’d read so much about, and has assumed would never happen in our lifetimes, had indeed arrived. There is no putting if off anymore.

And yet. In falling apart, we often can be quickly and sometimes radically reborn. I learned this lesson when my daughter died eight years earlier, and I was forced to reinvent my life and my work. I discovered self-care at the time, a practice I’ve since written about extensively. Now a new awareness has begun to sink in.

I need self-care more than ever– and it can be green.

Here is what my new ‘green self-care’ practices look like. First of all, I am only willing to live my values now…and not someone else’s. That means I put myself and the earth first, before the entreaties of corporate entities like oil, gas and plastic companies that don’t have my best interests at heart. Okay, yes, sometimes I will have to drive to, say, the doctor or the grocery store. But often I can just walk or bike when once I might have driven.

I’m beginning to realize my fealty to oil and gas has been purely habitual … like thinking of my bike as an ‘only sometimes for exercise’ ride. My city has lots of lovely walking and bike paths, and I know how to use them. And if I don’t want to walk, there’s a bike sharing station just down the street. I’m also no stranger to public transportation so I can use that as well. One way or another, I can get where I need to go without so much dependence on my car.

Here’s the self-care angle: all that walking and biking is bound to be good for my body, right?

Also, I’ve cut red meat entirely out of my diet. While I’ve often said I was going to do this, I would cave to the occasional burger or lamb craving. But now meat is officially off the table, given the effects of cattle raising on the planet. I’m even thinking I will take the plunge and try going vegan for a month, to completely remove cows from my life. The health benefits are obvious, and the meat alternatives plentiful. (I’m a particular fan of Impossible Burger.)

There are also all the low consumption tricks we can do in our homes… and some merge nicely with self-care. Washing your clothing in cold water preserves the fabric a lot better, and hanging clothes to dry in the sun adds a peaceful touch of Zen to the day. Reducing your dependency on screens gives your brain and your eyes a much needed rest, while it reduces stress on the power grid.

In fact, unplugging from the myriad sources of electronica will make my life far less stressful in general. Do I need to deeply immerse in social media and news feeds of all my devices? No. Instead, I can turn them off and return to reading good old books, and journaling in my notebook. I can start playing my piano again, and do more jigsaw puzzles. I can call my sisters, or old friends just to chat. Meditating seems to be a fit here, as well.

I can see plenty of walks in nature in my future, too. But this time I won’t be so focused on rushing along for the sweatiest workout. Now I’m inclined to move slowly and savor the natural, but fragile beauty around me. Which is, not coincidentally,  essential for optimal brain health. Not to mention an excellent way to beat anxiety and depression.

Can it be that by simply embracing green practices, my own self-care gets kicked up a notch as well? I say yes. And now I’m ready to develop an entirely new set of conscious, healthy habits.

I suspect I will not dive into them all at once, in one sweeping, radical do-or-die move. Instead, I will ease my way along, experimenting with what works and what doesn’t, so I can build a truly sustainable new set of green self-care practices that lasts the rest of my life.

At the very least, it’s not only what I want and need. It’s what the Earth clearly needs as well.

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