Tiny Choices Survey: Tris!
By Jenn (TinyChoices.com) | June 19, 2009
Vital statistics (name, age, location, link to website/blog)?
my name is tris mccall. i am thirty-seven years old, which is certainly old enough. you can find out much more than you’d ever want to know about me at www.trismccall.net.
How do you reside (apartment or house, roommates)? Are your housing decisions dictated by choice or necessity? Please explain.
i live in a two-room apartment in downtown jersey city with my girl. the apartment is “ours”, which means we pay citibank rather than an actual human landlord. this is unfortunate, but i like the place. it has high ceilings and lots of windows.
How do you travel (transit, car, etc)? Are your travel decisions dictated by choice or necessity? Please explain.
i travel by bicycle. i don’t have a driver’s licence and i wouldn’t want one.
Tell us about a Tiny Choice you’ve made in your life.
my small choices are all inconsequential, so i don’t remember making them. my large choices are probably inconsequential too, but i need to monumentalize *something*.
What is the one environmental dilemma you personally struggle the most with?
in order to keep me alive, hundreds of thousands of living beings need to die. these living beings never did anything to me. yet i don’t want to die — so i eat, trample, and otherwise destroy the organic life around me. it is no romantic exaggeration (nor is it in any way flattering or distinguishing) to call myself an agent of death; one busily cutting a man-shaped swath of devastation through the biosphere. this leads to what theologian paul tillich calls “anxiety of condemnation”. tillich claims we’ve all got it, but some are more conscious of it than others are.
What is one Tiny Choice you can make in that direction?
i agree with the theologian: there is nothing you can do about the anxiety of condemnation. as long as you’re alive, you’re going to be killing things, or paying for others to kill things for you. perhaps you can throw yourself at the feet of some sort of supernatural intercessor-figure? that is the hope of millions of religious people, anyway: a divine or quasidivine intercessor has been sacrificed to lift the burden of the guilt that accumulates from living on this planet.
What is the one environmental Tiny Choice you make that people question (in either a positive educational or a negative hassle way) you the most about?
nobody ever hassles me about anything. they’re either afraid to, or they’re bored silly by my all-too-predictable responses. probably the latter.
What is the one environmental Tiny Choice you would like every single person to adopt?
i do not understand why so many people choose to live in gigantic mega-houses on the distant peripheries of metropolitan areas. it’s as if they *want* to demonstrate they can burn all the fossil fuel they like. and of course they can; it’s a free country. sort of. it also strikes me as batshit nuts that people are comfortable walking around all day with small radioactive devices pressed against their ears. but i realize nobody agrees with me about this, so i’ll continue talking to the wall about it.
Do you feel like you make sacrifices for environmentalism? Please explain.
since i’m only alive to type this because there’s a ecosystem here to sustain me, it would be incredibly presumptuous for me to say that i make sacrifices for the environment.
Are you generally: optimistic, pessimistic, neutral about environmentalism and the future?
i am certainly no responsible steward of the environment, so it is with no self-righteousness that i say that it seems like human beings are hell-bent on fashioning an apocalypse. perhaps we are determined to demonstrate our power with the universe as our witness? al gore said we’re treating the natural world like a business in liquidation. that seems about right.
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