Who you calling a "Tree Hugger"?

Over the years I have been accused of being a “tree hugger” more that once. Personally I associate the term tree hugger with the nuts that spike trees and hurt loggers, stage sit ins to save some worm or sit up on billboards fasting until some developer stops bulldozing land. Being called a tree hugger seemed like my friends were calling me crazy or something.

When I was growing up in Southern California, I remember smog alerts and days where the sky was so brown we couldn't see the valley from our home in Tarzana Hills. The area I lived in has a little pull off area that is featured in movies like “Valley Girl” They must have filmed right after a Santa Ana wind blew all the smog to Lancaster. I can't remember ever seeing stars at home in Tarzana. Surfing at the beaches of California meant coming home with tar spots all over your feet from the oil wells off the coast and scrubbing off the oily layers off goop that would stick to the Zog's Sex Wax on your surfboard. When my parents couldn't take it any more we would get on the Catalina ferry boat or drive up to see our family friends, the Bushnell's, in Bass Lake California which is just outside Yosemite.

I remember sitting on the top of Catalina Island with my dad, and he would tell me of his youth in Glendale California. He would think out loud, telling of a day when you could see snow capped peaks in the winter, and starry nights in the summer. He would often say things like “I don't know where you can go live and be away from the pollution, and still get a decent job”. In 1980 he gave us the answer without knowing it, my parents divorced that year and the kids moved to Bass Lake to live with the Bushnell's for the summer while my mom looked for a place to live.

We settled just down the road from Bass Lake in Oakhurst, California. As a teenager, this was a fate worse than death, no TV, FM radio from Monterrey California only at night. Over the next four years I really appreciated living in the clean air of Oakhurst, and the small town feel which is now gone. The early 1990's in Oakhurst was as close to Mayberry as you could get. One blinking read light at the “Talking Bear”. I met some great friends who also grew up surfing the polluted waters of Southern California.

My new friends and I met several people over the years at Bass Lake and that has grown to be the place I would call home more than any other place I have lived. The Bushnell's no longer live there, and a few years ago my wife and I were guests of their fabulous new waterfront home. Most of my other friends are still there but due to my current situation I just haven't made the time to go back.

Today I live in Houston Texas. This is a result of several misguided decisions my wife and I made while we were living 3000 miles apart. Me in a tent in the middle east and she being home alone in Green Valley, California just outside of Napa. This week we are visiting the west coast again trying to figure out how to move back. At some point in the late 70's and early 80's California had an uprising of sorts that resulted in some of the toughest environmental laws in the country, a tax upheaval that resulted in near zero property taxes and the changes are palatable today.

The real estate prices in California are called “crazy” by most of the people I meet in Texas. Simple analysis shows several things. Stricter building codes mean higher quality in California, lower taxes are offset by a higher cost of entry which we call house prices, and the cleaner streets, highways and roads are the benefit of the “tree hugger laws” in California as the Texans say. Every morning in Texas I have to pick up the trash that is thrown in my yard. Californian's just don't think that way about throwing trash out the window. In fact several times a day most days I watch people roll down their window and toss out a complete bag of trash from the local fast food joint. There is nothing more appealing about a Sunday drive around the lake in a classic ragtop than to be hit with a bag full of empty ketchup packets don't you think?

The air in the San Fernando Valley is clear and crisp today. The beaches are littered with kelp and jelly fish while the dolphins and seals are playing in the surf just under 100 feet from where I was sitting last night. With any luck, the state will get a fiscal reality check in this current economic downturn and stop creating incentives for illegals to come and the wealthy to leave, a problem Ken Fisher points out in his book “The Ten Roads to Riches”.

When we started our business, Rustic Creek, we didn't know what it would do, and like any long range business it is constantly evolving. The name creates the vision of life we are after, it is rather strange to some people that a company selling and managing technology is called Rustic Creek. We think differently. Technology should reduce our impact on the earth. We don't sell throw away consumer technology like the big box stores. Instead we look for long term solutions that enhance a business or home lifestyle while improving our environmental position.

Our company is not that concerned about “carbon credits” or any of the other voodoo potions that Al Gore has come up with so he could create his companies trading these invisible commodities. What we are concerned about is genuine efficiency and conservation. Everything has a trade off. Hybrid and Electric cars still have the batteries and their associated waste to deal with. Some other technologies have evolved to a solid maturity. Compact Fluorescent lights, Carbon fiber auto parts and LED TV's are among the solid winners today. Sadly those industries needed several failures before we succeeded.

One of the lessons to take from California and other Tree Hugger states is to acknowledge the real cost of living. Yes an LED replacement light for my back walkway cost $13.99 at Costco. The walkway has three can lights. Yes I could have bought a CFL for $5.99 or an incandescent for $1.99. In my mind, the long term cost of the 3.5W LED lights more than offsets the cost difference from the $1.99 75W incandescent lamp. The LED is using 1/20th of the energy. If I leave it on 24/7 I still use the same power as an hour and a half of the 75W bulb. The rest of my house is CFL all on a computer control so they turn off when I leave or no one is home. The plan is to replace all the CFL's as they burn out. With any luck by then the LED's will get better and in three to four years my house will be all LED reducing my energy usage even more.

Wal-Marts experiment with CFL's has been a very telling tale of what happens when you let people who aren't educated in finance make financial decisions. They overwhelmingly picked the much less expensive incandescent lamp because it represented todays money to them. They have never been taught how to plan or forecast to the future. My own family does it and it drives me nuts. Finance should be a required class in high school. Donald Trump makes a good point of this in “Think Like a Champion”.

This lack of financial education in our society is why everyone was counting on pension funds, retirement funds or social security to retire. Most people didn't want to have to think or plan ahead. Now they are just lost and angry at the government when it is all their fault.

The California approach with laws like Title 24 is probably the best approach. As much as I don't like the government to be involved, it is clear people won't do it on their own. During the 1970's I remember the uproar from environmentalists over things like the foam box a quarter pounder came in at McDonalds. Knowing that very few people would actually recycle correctly some one got laws passed to force Mac's to use biodegradable food packaging. You can see those wrappers and boxes all along the Texas highways along with millions of cigarette butts.

Very few states today have a redemption on recyclable containers. By not doing so we have given an incentive to throw away everything instead of recycle. I don't want my grand kids living on top of a giant land fill, do you? As the population grows, where is all this trash going to go?

I don't know what happened to the old reduce, reuse and recycle mentality. My Dad was born just before the depression and he taught me to use everything until it was gone. Old jars to store parts in the garage, return the coke bottles for a refill. I would never have called my dad an environmentalist or a tree hugger but maybe he was one of the first.

If wanting to live in a place where we breathe clean air, we don't throw trash out our car windows, don't drill for oil on every beach and don't want to have our property taxes eat us alive in retirement is being a tree hugger, then I guess I am a tree hugger.