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From the Editor: Dancing is carbon neutral

From the Editor: Dancing is carbon neutral

Some might find it hard to see how green issues are ours in particular. Though we in the LGBT community certainly breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat, commute, vote and find the need to stretch out our legs just like anybody else does, we are disproportionately urban – our lives often bring us from one city core to the next, we tend to hop into city bars, clubs and coffee shops to hang out; basically, a lot of us exist a bit farther from that “great outdoors” envisioned when people think of the environment.

Of the many things brought up in association with LGBT people, rugged outdoorsiness ranks low – but it’s clear that’s more of a stereotype than a rule when gay ski week or the gay rodeo comes around, and it’s certainly not true for this community in Colorado. But regardless of where we each live or feel the most free, we’re also a community with a concern for the wider world, for social justice, for beauty and for future generations we hope will benefit from what we fight for today. That leads us to care. What good would all our passion for equality, for LGBT youth and a society of acceptance be if the less–unjust world we work to leave behind was defined instead by pollution, sprawl, spiking fuel prices and wars or recessions driven by vanishing natural resources?

The last thing we at Out Front want this issue to be is a lecture; we’re no better on average than anybody else when it comes to “green” living. We do print our issues, after all, on paper. We use electricity that comes from coal, we drive cars that use gasoline, we fly on airplanes, we would–like–to–but–don’t–always–remember to put or computer screens on the “energy saver” setting or to recycle when we can. We eat food that comes to the grocery store on diesel trucks. In plastic packaging. Which we throw away. And we have no idea whether our food is (gasp!) genetically–modified. When I say “we” it is not some fancy editorial way of saying “me;” I am confident our whole staff commits these acts – acts which, though not seeming particularly egregious, won’t be sustainable over the long haul without social or technological solutions. We, like you, would probably nod our heads poignantly hearing about all the waste the average American generates in a year, then go right back to what we were doing before. We’re not sure lectures are motivating for anyone. So there you go.

But we do want to lift up the best among us who manage to tread a little lighter on the planet, and to recognize all the easy ways people in our community live more eco­–friendly lives. There are ways we set a new course – one that, though it may seem just a tiny pivot right now, arrives at a drastically different destination over time. They are choices, like how we want to idealize the perfect home, what kind of technology to invest in, what kind of cities to build, what companies to support, what to drive.

That thing about gays so often being city–dwellers? That’s actually good for the environment when it means living in compact city homes or apartments that make more efficient use of land, taking subways or busses or light rail instead of driving, having smaller cars (which anyone who’s had to parallel park in Capitol Hill appreciates), or patronizing the arts – theater, music, galleries, museums – that consume much fewer natural resources–per–dollar­–spent than a lot of other pastimes. Maybe that last one’s a stretch, but wherever you live, this one is good news for our community: Dancing is carbon neutral!

So is playing flag football, chasing your kids, jogging around the park, singing, stumbling home from Charlie’s on foot, sleeping in or walking a parade route. Flirting is carbon neutral. So are cuss words. Sex is carbon neutral too (porn is not).

It’s not such a sacrifice, you might agree, because those moments – when the car is in park, or the lights are off – are some of the best in life.

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