It's the rainforest all over again

I can't NOT do something while our country spirals. But does it actually help?

Dude, I am failing SO miserably at moderating my consumption of news and social media. I was hoping things would not get quite so dire, quite so fast. But they are.

I really want to get back to writing about things like middle-age spread and Tyler, my annoying ChatGPT intern, and husbandly grocery shopping exploits. Things of that nature. But I can’t. Not yet. Case in point: Remember I wrote a love letter to my fave supermarket, the Market Basket in Chelsea? The grand pageant of humanity from around the world? The wonderful employees? Yeah, those employees are too scared to go to work now, because they’re afraid of ICE raids.

So, here’s a post about the rainforest. And why I am, yet again, having flashbacks to the late 80s as I watch the horrors of the Trump / Musk regime unfold. With a special appearance by my bad high school bangs!

As you may or may not recall, in the late 80s/early 90s the Terrible Thing We Must Stop du jour was the destruction of the rainforest. It was all over pop culture, in fashion, in food products. Remember Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch ice cream? And that little seal with a frog on it to show that products were Rainforest Alliance certified?

This rainforest mania was all going on right as I was waking up to the wider world, going off to Soviet Summer camps on peace exchanges and whatnot. The year after that trip, I spent the summer at The Worldpeace Camp in Maine (which my parents co-owned), where a big part of the programming was learning about various ways to Make A Difference (tm).

At one point, there was a presentation on the destruction of the rainforest. It included a viewing of this extremely cringe “Rainforest Rap” video, complete with white dude in one of those unfortunate tan safari hats that were briefly ubiquitous in the 80s, trying to sound like a rapper. Maybe you, too, were subjected to it as a teenager or middle schooler. (I still periodically get the refrain stuck in my head: “The RAINforest! The tropical RAINforest!”) And maybe you had one of those hats. (I did!)

Fig. 1 “Rapper”

Cheesy video aside, when I learned that a football-field-sized swatch of rainforest was being destroyed every 78 seconds and a species was going extinct every few months, I felt a full-body sense of panic. Why wasn’t anyone stopping this? What could we do? What could I do??

The only advice the adults (WHO WERE NOT STOPPING IT!!) seemed to have was to not to buy palm oil products, beef from south America, or teak, mahogany or rosewood furniture. Very actionable advice for a teenager. (Flash forward to me narrowing a suspicious eye at my parents’ dining room set. Those chairs aren’t teak, are they, Mom? MOM?)

But I wasn’t content to just stand around scrutinizing furniture and eating sustainably grown brazil nuts or whatever while the biosphere burned. And the rainforest was only the half of it: There were landfills overflowing, spotted owl habitats being destroyed by logging, a hole in the ozone layer getting bigger all the time.

It was killing me not to do anything. Why wasn’t EVERYBODY doing something?? What was the matter with people?? (A FOOTBALL FIELD EVERY 78 SECONDS!)

When I got back to school that Fall, a friend and I promptly founded an environmental club. Our group single-handedly set up and administered a paper recycling program, sold “shares” of a cloud forest preserve in Costa Rica, picked up litter, planted seedlings, and a made signs telling people to recycle their soda cans and boycott Burger King and Just Say No to palm oil. (I may be making up the Just Say No part, but very possibly not. It was 1989.)

My bangs may be hair-sprayed within an inch of their life, but NOT with the aerosol kind!

We worked very hard, and kept very busy. It felt good to be doing something—lots of thing! But did any of it actually Make A Difference in the grand scheme of things? I don’t know. (In spite of the fact that I am quoted in the above newspaper story as saying “I feel we are making a difference.”)

Maybe we diverted a few thousand pounds of worksheets and notebook paper from the landfill. Maybe one of my classmates, ten years later, while setting up their wedding registry at Crate and Barrel heard a little voice in their head whisper No! Not the rosewood salad bowl!

But here we are decades later and the rainforest is still being destroyed at an alarming rate, the planet is warming, and the oceans and air and even our bodies are full of plastic, etc.

And still. I feel like I had no choice to do what I did in high school. It was an almost physical compulsion.

I’m feeling the same thing now, as I watch the Mad King and his tech bro Rasputin take a sledgehammer to our government and institutions, issue Orwellian decrees and executive orders (mine are much better), and spew one batshit crazy, fascist idea after another. It’s as heartbreaking and anxiety-inducing as those football-field-sized swaths of rainforest destruction, times a thousand.

And, once again, I can’t not do something.

So I’ve been trying to take action. (This time with better bangs.) I’m making calls and sharing news about actions people can take. I went to a protest in Boston last week—one of those 50 states / 50 capitals / 1 day marches things—and will probably do it again.

Luckily, there are a lot of other panicky WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!! types out there just like me, flooding the phone lines of congress, showing up at demonstrations, writing letters, making donations. Other people are finding their own ways to fight against authoritarianism, inhumanity, and bigotry, whether through art or community involvement or (God love ‘em) trying to get through to their Trump-loving friends and family.

Will any of it, in the end, make a difference? I don’t honestly know. Sometimes it just feels futile. Like avoiding palm oil and teak.

But it doesn’t matter. We have to do it anyway.

If you can’t be silly while you protest, the fascists win.

Finally, I’ve got a bit of fun news to share: My novel The Society of Shame advanced to become a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor!! I can’t decide if I’m more excited about the honor or the fact that I get to dress up all fancy and go to an award show in NYC. You can check out all this year’s Thurber Prize finalist and semi-finalist books (and buy them, if you like!) right here.

As always, thank you for reading. Stay strong out there. And remember: Just Say No to Fascism. And mahogany.

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