Dan Akst

Can you blame me for being cynical? Every dinner party I attend is marked by pious denunciations of greed and excess, yet all the guests have multiple cars, multiple homes, and a tendency to break out in hives if they don’t take a planet-warming plane flight once a month or so.

Recently an acquaintance of mine, at such a gathering, condemned the horrors of Hummers — then brightened when she had the chance to tell us about the major addition she was about to tack onto her house, the better for her tiny family to rattle around in. I was at another dinner party where the hosts, who also hold all the right environmental views, both work more than 100 miles from home. And “home” is a fashionably old farmhouse that appears to be devoid of insulation.

My kids’ school is “going green.” So far, this seems to mean requiring pupils to buy a metal water bottle — just the sort of fetish-object we environmentalists love. But despite a student body distributed over a vast area, there is no organized attempt to carpool. During spring break, moreover, the school’s well-to-do families fly hither and yon, or drive to the ski slopes, or shuttle between their houses. Some of the cars still display their Obama bumper stickers, cherished amulets against reproach.

Who are we kidding? Well-intentioned people everywhere lament global warming, but few of us care enough to take even the most reasonable basic steps to make a change. We salve our conscience by recycling cans or buying locally grown rutabagas, as if such nonsense matters when set against our own — and our country’s — gigantic fossil footprint.

There are, of course, those who don’t believe in man-made global warming, or don’t consider it a big deal compared to malnutrition, disease and other Third World maladies. I think these people are mostly wrong, but at least they aren’t hypocrites. Before we can expect the skeptics to change, it might be nice if we set a better example. And if you’re about to protest that you already live in a yurt, save your breath. This isn’t about you. It’s about the rest of us — and I count myself foursquare among them — who tut-tut and wring our hands and then drive home, content in our sanctimony.

One way to change that is to do something that actually matters this Earth Day. First, figure out your own carbon footprint (several websites will do this for you) and see how you stack up against the national average, which of course is way too high anyway. Then set a reasonable goal for reduction and publicly commit to it — at your next dinner party, for example.

Do not pretend you’re going to bicycle everywhere, or that it’s somehow smart or ethical to spend $50,000 to cut your electric bill by 20 percent. On the contrary, first do what yields the biggest reduction for the smallest pain — and measure the results to see how you’re doing. You could give up beef, for instance. Fly less. Change your bulbs and plug the holes in your house. Buy stuff used. These modest sacrifices will have a much bigger impact than obsessing over where your eggplants come from. You can go up the scale from there, perhaps by considering an on-demand hot water system. The idea is continuous, sensible improvement; at our house we use a ten-year payback metric. If a measure won’t repay its cost, then there’s probably a better way to spend the money to save the earth.

At the same time, let’s acknowledge the limits of caulk guns and compact fluorescents — to say nothing of the Kyoto accord. To make a real domestic difference — of the kind that could help us make a difference on the world stage — will take political action. Thus it’s probably better to invest in political candidates than solar panels.

We seem to have forgotten that sometimes we need government to protect us from ourselves. Often it guards against the wrong harms (as with Prohibition or the war on drugs). But not always. Long ago, in a time of crisis, we agreed to tax ourselves to guard against destitution in retirement, and the voters still strongly support Social Security. Perhaps this time around we can find the will to tax ourselves (and our carbon use) to guard against environmental destitution. Then we can safely ignore Earth Day, smug in the knowledge that we aren’t the sort of people who are satisfied with empty gestures.

To some environmentalists, the shoppers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. If only people stopped spending at these awful big-box stores, the thinking goes, the earth might be saved — and local businesses would flourish.

Shop to it!

From an environmental perspective, there is in fact much to dislike about the chains. Their low prices, sustained by a rapidly globalizing economy, promote resource-churning consumerism. They are typically reached only by auto, and thus inspire millions of greenhouse-gas-spewing car trips. And surrounded by a sea of parking lots, they are anchors of the sprawling new suburbs many of us love to hate.

But the case against the chains is not nearly so clear-cut — if you’ll pardon the expression in these tree-hugging precincts. My own view is that, from a save-the-earth standpoint at least, shopping at these stores isn’t evil. It may even make the environment better.

Events of Chain

Bear in mind, first of all, that chain stores didn’t only just appear. Sears and Montgomery Ward, to name two, cropped up in the late 19th century. They were innovative and dominating retailers in their heyday, and while today we find the former quaintly harmless (the latter is dead and buried), it’s worth remembering that once upon a time they generated some of the same antagonism that Wal-Mart does — for driving out local merchants, for example. In the 1920s, these mail-order businesses began sprouting brick-and-mortar branches on Main Streets all over America — in the days when people walked and rode transit. Eventually they did follow their customers to suburbia, but their early history shows that it’s possible to be a chain in a world with a set of transportation options and land-use policies quite different from today’s.

Yes, today’s stores are bigger. But the point is, multi-outlet retailers simply aren’t to blame for the car-oriented society in which we find ourselves, and different zoning (to say nothing of different consumer preferences) could produce a very different retailing environment, chain ownership notwithstanding.

Nobody’s asphalt but our own.

Chain retailing, moreover, has environmental advantages. Stores like Wal-Mart and Target offer one-stop shopping for families, surely obviating many car trips. By offering only giant quantities, Sam’s Club minimizes both shopping trips and packaging — it doesn’t even offer grocery bags. If you hate Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Sam’s parent, there is always Costco, which offers many of the same advantages plus higher wages for workers.

Large chains are also easier to monitor — and pressure — than a thousand local lumberyards or toy stores, in part because they are public companies, with all the disclosure and press scrutiny that that entails. Criticism of Wal-Mart clearly has played a role in its much-ballyhooed recent initiatives to improve environmental performance and give more employees health insurance, both arenas where small companies frankly have little to brag about. Note also how central management can rapidly change practices at thousands of stores: Home Depot now is America’s biggest seller of lumber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and the company’s size permits elaborate efforts to determine where its wood comes from and how it was harvested. The chain contends that it now knows the provenance of every broomstick and two-by-four on its shelves.

Another environmental knock on the chains is that they supposedly export pollution by selling so much stuff made in places with lax environmental standards (to say nothing of lax labor laws). At the very least, an awful lot of energy is expended moving products around the world to feed the global manufacturing beast. Surely it would be better to buy local.

In fact, for environmental and other reasons, it is much better not to. The main reason is that, ecologically speaking, money really matters. The worst thing for the global environment, aside from so many Americans tooling around in Ford Explorers, is massive poverty. By bringing economies of scale to the distribution of goods and leveraging the differing productive capacities of nations, modern mass merchandisers have found a good way to make the world richer — something mass merchandisers have been doing in America for more than 100 years. The resources expended transporting goods simply pale against the affluence that results. And having money is what enables us to afford a cleaner, healthier environment.

Despite our misgivings, moreover, the chains spread around this wealth. We may not envy workers in developing countries who take factory jobs, but apparently they vastly prefer these to the rural life they are leaving behind in droves. In the short term, the industrialization of those countries may lead to some environmental problems, but in the longer run it’s all to the good. Economists have shown again and again that environmental conditions worsen as a country develops, only to improve again as it grows affluent enough to demand and afford cleaner water and air. It’s possible that someday a country will leap past the dirty stage of development straight to a post-industrial economy, but meanwhile the model we have is better than any known alternative, on both humanitarian and environmental grounds.

“Fears that globalization necessarily hurts the environment are not well-founded,” writes economist Jeffrey A. Frankel of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “A survey reveals little statistical evidence, on average across countries, that openness to international trade undermines national attempts at environmental regulation through a ‘race to the bottom’ effect.”

Low, Low Vices

There are other social and economic arguments about the virtues and vices of chain stores, of course, all of them beyond the scope of this column. But at base, I think, a large factor in our objections to these stores — particularly in the environmental argument against them — is aesthetic. And there’s no denying that looks matter; our love of nature’s beauty is a big reason we care about the environment, after all. Squatting dumbly behind their vast aprons of blacktop, America’s suburban chain stores are as ugly as they are banal, together comprising a built environment that exemplifies Joni Mitchell’s song about paving paradise for a parking lot. And she didn’t even have a verse about runoff.

Perhaps their worst offense, in other words, is that the chains represent such a drastic homogenization and dehumanization of the landscape. Sadly enough, this is the dimension of the chain-store phenomenon that is least likely to change. The simple reason is that the automobile is here to stay, even if the infernal — er, that is, internal — combustion engine is not.

Since the chains aren’t about to vanish, maybe a better strategy is to go ahead and shop there. Estimate your savings each time you go, and then put that money aside. At the end of the year, you should be able to make a pretty nifty donation to the environmental cause of your choice.

Imagine a country — we’ll call it Hobsonia — that requires all its residents to shop at officially assigned supermarkets based on where they live. Now, Hobsonians care passionately about food, and since the law allows them to move if they wish, citizens decide where to live based largely on where they can buy groceries. Those with money move to the best supermarket districts, which tend to be in affluent areas where store managers know that unhappy customers have the scratch to move elsewhere. Hobsonia thus sorts itself into good supermarket districts and bad. While people talk passionately about improving the latter, nothing ever seems to make much difference.

In America, we understand that shopping is too important for us to forbid people from changing stores without moving. So we only apply this Hobsonian policy to public education.

Teach your children well.

As we trundle our little ones onto those yellow buses for yet another school year, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of schools in the frenzied conversion of open space to strip malls and subdivisions — a process known familiarly as sprawl. This car-oriented, low-density development on the edge of metropolitan areas isn’t pretty; it means more paving, greenhouse gases, and traffic fatalities, not to mention less mobility for the young and the elderly. Sprawling communities are associated with obesity, probably because nobody walks anywhere, and they also strike many of us as alienating and indistinguishable.

Where do schools come in? The standard formulation is that sprawl harms urban school systems by draining middle-class students and their tax-paying families. But any parent will tell you that urban schools also promote sprawl by driving away families who can afford to leave. Michael E. Lewyn, a visiting professor of law at George Washington University, has observed that we give urban parents three choices: They can send their kids to the lousy and possibly dangerous public schools in the city. They can ante up the exorbitant tuition for private school, assuming their kids can get in. Or they can move to the best suburb they can afford, where decent public schools are available to anyone with the price of a house.

While some people genuinely like faceless suburbs, many of us who loathe them move there anyway because of our kids. We tolerate boredom, protracted commutes, and endless shuttling from errand to errand by minivan because, much as we loved Thai food and art museums, there was no acceptable place in the city to educate our children. In a 2004 paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association entitled “Smart Growth and School Reform,” University of Maryland urbanologist Howell S. Baum says it plainly: “Improving city schools is central to managing sprawl.”

Their parents’ hell …

Ignoring the chain of causality between bad schools and sprawl leads environmentalists to overlook the simplest and potentially most powerful anti-sprawl measure available, which is to let urban parents choose their kids’ schools — even if those schools aren’t in the city or aren’t even public. Ethically, this notion is supposed to be anathema. Surely we can’t trust urban parents to choose their children’s schools. Why don’t we just improve the inner-city schools? Maybe more testing will work. Or how about vastly greater funding? Perhaps smaller class sizes, bilingual education, phonics, or school uniforms will do the trick.

These views are held by most of the caring people I know, but I notice that hardly any of them send their kids to an inner-city school — except, perhaps, for the odd island of success in an ocean of pedagogical failure. These few thriving urban schools tend to be in expensive neighborhoods, or magnet schools with special programs. Either way, admission is essentially voluntary. So why not give everyone this choice? Why not let parents pick any school, public or private, that meets official requirements? Even excluding private schools, a sensible system could still let parents choose freely from among any public schools that will have their kids — even schools in different districts.

It’s hard to predict how many middle-class families would choose urban life if they didn’t have to worry about the schools, but it’s fair to assume the proportion would be substantial. The childless bourgeoisie are a fixture of urban life in most major cities, and the couples who move out to some new subdivision when they have kids are stock figures as well. Duke University economist Thomas Nechyba, who has created a theoretical model of the relationship between school choice and housing decisions, finds in his simulation that giving all parents school vouchers substantially boosted household income in poor school districts. The reason? Many affluent people moved back.

Oh yeah, and as a bonus, school choice could also help desegregate the cities, rescue them from their never-ending financial crises, force them to provide competitive educational offerings, reduce air pollution, and maybe even save some lives on the nation’s highways.

Of course, there are other reasons — reasons of justice and racial equality and economic fairness — to give parents much greater school choice. Why, after all, should only the poorest families, those whose kids desperately need better schooling to break the cycle of poverty, find themselves unable to opt out of bad schools? How are we ever going to narrow the gap between rich and poor if a good education depends on how much real estate you can afford?

These arguments mysteriously fail to resonate among many of the environmentally minded people I know. One reason might be that environmentalists are generally an affluent bunch, and thus are beneficiaries of the lopsided school-choice voucher system already in place in our society. These vouchers — the technical term for them is “cash” — are used by middle-class parents to hire moving vans and buy houses in the suburbs. Like our health insurance system, it works great — if you can afford it.

Another reason might be the mechanism — competition — whereby school choice would work. Many of the environmentally minded people I know are uncomfortable with competition, which sounds a little too red in tooth and claw. But competition among schools already works: competition in higher education has led to excellent quality and lots of choices. And environmentalists have managed to warm up to the competitive marketplace before. Markets in sulfur-dioxide emissions credits and halibut fishing rights, to cite just two examples, have proven their mettle in cost-effectively achieving environmental goals.

Why not a more competitive marketplace in schooling? Imagine if Americans could choose a new school without necessarily having to choose a new community. Maybe then the demand driving sprawl would slow down, and the rate of land development would fall back a bit toward the rate of population growth. We might also have better educated kids, thanks to more responsive (and less socially segregated) schools — kids whose smarter choices as adults might just lead to real environmental progress.