Dark Green ‘carborexics’: The obsessive generation of extreme environmental activists

Psychiatrists in the United States are warning that extreme environmental awareness may be creating a generation of “carborexics”.

By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 6:48AM BST 21 Oct 2008

A new survey claims that seven per cent of Americans now qualify as “dark green”, hard core recyclers and carbon footprint worriers. But it is unclear whether some of their behaviour qualifies as eco-leadership or bordering on the obsessive-compulsive.
A report in the New York Times found evidence of all manner of lifestyles that might be considered carborexic. Dark green activities in the US include running cars on waste vegetable oil and using one’s lawn as a bathroom to save water. Others sleep en masse to reduce heating bills.
Sharon Astyk, a farmer in New York state, is using a special calculator to reduce her family’s energy consumption to 10 per cent of the national average.
She and her husband grow almost all their own produce, keep chickens and turkeys, and spend less than £500 on consumer goods each year, most of which are second-hand.
Their four children often sleep in a huddle to conserve body heat. Miss Astyk said she was aware that some neighbours regarded them as “energy anorexics” but said their attitude had softened as energy prices had risen.
Anita Lavine and Joe Turcotte, a couple in Seattle, reuse the same Ziploc bag for a year.
When her two small children return from kindergarten, Miss Lavine scrubs the bag that held their soiled clothes and biodegradable nappies so she can use them the next day.
She keeps the thermostat in their home at 60 degrees Fahrenheit and is about to acquire three chickens to enhance the family’s recycling and self-sufficiency.
“My friends think I’m the craziest person,” she said.
Jay Matsueda, a Californian, runs his Mercedes on waste oil from a local restaurant and gives reusable bamboo cutlery as presents so people do not need to take plastic cutlery from takeaways.
He occasionally relieves himself on his lawn to “save a flush”, he told the newspaper.
David Chameides, a Los Angeles cameraman, is collecting all the waste he accumulates in a year in his basement and writing about it regularly on an internet blog.
But some mental health experts are worried. “If you can’t have something in your house that isn’t green or organic... if you’re criticising friends because they’re not living up to your standards of green, that’s a problem,” said Elizabeth Carl, a psychologist and specialist in obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Dr Jack Hirschowitz, a New York psychiatrist, said such behaviour qualified as a disorder if it was taking precedence over everything else in the subject’s life.
David Zucker, a sustainability specialist at Porter Novelli, a PR company which has studied America’s “dark greens”, said they were inordinately influential over other people’s behaviour.
He said the “deepest dark greens” were “bordering on the fanatic”, adding: “They’re pushing towards a lifestyle of zero consumption”.
He added: “You know Americans. We take everything to an extreme.”