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V: So you’ve become a “greenie?”
M: When I used to fly, I’d get up in the air I’d say, ‘What's that brown line on the horizon.' I’d land and say ‘What is that?’ And they’d say “That’s nothing.” But I knew it was not nothing, it was smog! And I’d see it in places where we didn’t used to see it— Las Vegas, Phoenix, or Albuquerque. You might expect it in Cleveland!! All this smog and no one wanted to say so. I’d just see the particulate evidence in the air. Power plants and factories were doing this.
I come from a place where the sky is blue all the time and people are supposed to know what a blue sky looks like. If you go back and see the movies made in the 50’s by John Ford or John Huston—they were shot in the desert or in California, under blue skies—in all the seasons.
Now there are no more consistent blue skies. You see the sky blue on one day or two, but then the sky is white. I’m not educated about the weather, truly this is only anecdotal, but I know in my bones it’s smog. I've seen the evidence and I’m very, very concerned now. Am I reaching a hysterical, feverish pitch?
V: How has the green revolution affected your life?
M:
I changed my car. I bought a Prius and the damn thing gets 40 mpg. I think it's great. We shut the lights out all the time. We recycle madly. We compost in our house.
I have a big drum on my terrace. We throw in coffee grounds, potato peels, apple cores and the gardener uses it to fertilize. In the house we built upstate, we put in geothermal and solar. Our meter is running negatively—we actually sell electricity back to the grid! The house is hot in winter, cool in summer, and it's free!
So I'm thrilled people are waking up to the environment. I think it's simply a lot of voices getting louder. Hurricane Katrina had a wake up effect. I believe, for the most part, people want to do the right thing. There’s a growing body of information on how to be green and organic, and without too much expense.
I have a mission. A woman in Africa planted a million trees. I’d like to do the same. That would be a fantastic legacy for me. I would like to encourage everyone to have a mission. Maybe say, “Alright, I’ll just pick up a piece of garbage every day.” I say just go out and do it. If everybody started thinking like this, it would be so fabulous. I really honor the earth because it has given and given and given us so much— and now it's time for us to give her a break.
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