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父亲常常把商店废弃的租用短袜拿回家，衣服穿了三十多年仍敝帚自珍，坚信“不浪费则不匮乏”；我则热衷于节能和回收利用，一度在车上黏贴“拯救鲸鱼、拯救人类”或“我不吃任何有脸的东西”的标签。我和父亲，谁是真正的环保模范？ My father has been stealthily rescuing the planet. He’d refer to himself as a frugal New Englander trained to turn off lights and live by the mantra “waste not, want not”.2 He’d never call himself an environmentalist—a title reserved for hippies, Democrats, and the state of Vermont.3 I’d long ago branded myself the environmentalist of the family, based on my devout canvas-bag toting, enthusiasm for organic broccoli, and the ability to pronounce the names of evil toxins like “phthalates” (pronounced as THA-layts).4 As a kid, I ignored my dad’s commitment to buying eggs from a nearby family, his annual opposition to store-bought Christmas gifts, and his infamous plea to persuade a local clothing store to hand over the loaner socks they would no longer be using.5 He finally came home triumphant one day, waving a pair of dingy white tube socks of two different lengths.6 “Girls!” he shouted, calling my mother, sister, and me into the kitchen to see the socks. He smiled like a Cheshire cat7. “They were free!” He converted to compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) years before it became popular.8 “These bulbs will outlive me,” I remember him saying with a far-off look in his eye.9 I complained that it took 15 minutes for the light to come on in the bathroom, and I didn’t want to endure that for the rest of his life. It took me several more years and a couple of academic degrees to switch out my own bulbs, after I’d moved to California (“Vermont West”) and wasn’t home so often. It was the summer I fell in love with Al Gore and told my fiancé that I threw away neither aluminum foil nor zip-lock bags, and we’d never use wrapping paper.10 He raised both eyebrows at what I paid for dish soap11, but I told him he’d thank me later. A year later, we got married and bought a Prius12. | 
