Members of other generations, from our parents to our grandkids, have reasons to blame us Boomers for messing up the planet. But still, we had our reasons, and our values emerged comprehensibly from our circumstances.
Growing up in DC in the 1960s, I was raised by people who grew up in the Depression, some 30 years before that. My parents grew up in straitened circumstances and tried to convey the importance of frugality to my brothers and me. They failed, in a predictable fashion, and also in a fashion emblematic of how we started our lurch toward environmental disaster.
In the late-1960s and early-1970s, as my brothers and I went from child to teen, my parents were constantly concerned about "waste." They insisted we "clean our plates" at every meal. They kept the house thermostat set low so that it took a sweater to be comfortable indoors, which they thought was appropriate. They docked our allowance for leaving lights on when we left a room. They reused plastic bags and scraps of aluminum foil.
At a certain point, I started rebelling in small ways: I’d never clean my plate (and still, on principle, I leave a morsel of food every time out). I took to trying to keep the house fully-illuminated. I turned the thermostat up every few minutes as they turned it back down. This was a fundamental dimension of my teen rebellion, as other generations might end up fighting about curfews, video games or when a kid should get a phone.
I'm critical of my own (and perhaps my generation's) ethic or anti-ethic of waste, or I try to be, and live a little differently now. But it's pretty built-in and in my heart I have difficulty making myself care. In a pinch or in a rush, I’ll still just chuck it all or take any shortcut, without calculating the carbon footprint. Let me say why.
In the1960s, I thought (a) that my parents weren’t living in reality. We weren't rich (my father was a reporter, my mother and step-father teachers), but we weren't broke. I tried to calculate what it cost to leave a lamp on for an hour: a cent or two, maybe, I thought. Now Ma, are we that broke, or is that going to make a difference this month? It's not worth worrying about. (Her response, "Well, better to keep that cent than give it to the power company, right?")
You want me to live as though we’re poor, Ma. But look around you: we’re not poor; this (Chevy Chase, DC) isn’t a poor neighborhood; it's now, not then. Your fear of dropping into poverty because we wasted some foil isn’t going to be realized, though things can go wrong if you lose your job or something, which seems unlikely here in 1969. Why are we pretending to be poor right now? Let's live in reality and enjoy what we have.
We should, I argued by enactment, live more loosely or even (as I secretly thought) waste things more carelessly because (b) our parents' Depression values were kind of grubby or materialistic. This has been my own realization in recent years (as I continue to deal with my mother, now 100, as well as my Millennial and Gen Z kids): I thought then that it was right not to worry about any of this if one could afford not to. I resolved consciously not to worry about money, and rarely have, except in a few moments of real brokeness. And I still feel the pull of what I believed then, even if I think it has helped lead us all toward disaster.
To me, my depression-era parents and their ilk seemed almost like misers: they spent so much of their time and energy accumulating and holding onto resources that they couldn't enjoy what they had. If my mother was thinking every day about every light that was left on, then she wasn't having great and broadening thoughts, I believed. My parents seemed like irrational Scrooges to me. They seemed to be most worried about the least important things. I wanted to clear my head of material considerations. I wanted to show that I was bigger than that. I wanted to be a poet and a philosopher and think great thoughts, not calculate the cost of fuel oil every day or trying to get another year out of that pair of pants.
Just chuck that pair of pants and buy two more, became my approach. It was pretty easy in my adulthood to buy two more, as you could buy Asian-manufactured pants by the bail at $9.99 at Walmart or Target. I wasn’t wasteful alone: my generation in the US was wasteful and also enabled in our waste by a world economy.
Even as a young man, I realized that my "don't-worry-about-it" style would have bad environmental consequences. My parents tried to say that, and when I pointed to the negligible global effects of a single person's or family's decisions to turn down the thermostat or clean their plates, they said "What if everyone thought that way? What would the world look like then?" Well, parents, I admit it might look kind of like this world, as we head into 2026. You definitely had a point.
Also, just for the hell of it, it’s worth pointing out that my parents' frugality was part of what allowed them to retire a bit early and buy a 20-acre farm in Virginia. I’m living here now in my own retirement and am in the process of inheriting the farm, though I never did save very much over all these decades. Their frugality did make a difference, not only a bit for the world as a whole, but profoundly for their own family.
And yet I still feel the power of the values I absorbed in the Boom, and I don’t entirely repudiate them. Or I’m doing what’s absolutely verboten for a wise pundit and philosopher such as myself: going back and forth, wondering, feeling bewildered still, or maybe finally, after all these years.
I don't want to focus obsessively on every shred of foil or switch off every lamp at the first opportunity. I do want to live in line with my resources now, pretending neither to be rich nor broke. And it's true that I sometimes secretly evaluate my own decision to get rid of something that's not really spent or to skip the recycling by the actual consequences of my particular action rather than by asking what the world would be like if everyone did that. I'm not necessarily clear on whether an ethic that centers on that hypothetical or fictional rule-making is plausible. In a way I don't see how it could be: I’m willing to take responsibility for my own actions, but not of the actions of everyone, for my own sin but not all sin. I don't see how I could take responsibility for everyone and everything like that. I’m not Jesus.
But yet I feel that I’ve been wrong this whole time too, and that even if I’m personally responsible only for a tiny proportion of the world's microplastics, I and my cohort could’ve done a lot better. Sorry, Ma! And sorry too, kids.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell