Oh, Thank Goodness : The Gift of Awareness in a Perilous Time

In 1989, the Earth trembled, skies poured, killer winds howled, tankers spilled and revolutions swept the globe. In Los Angeles, gang violence claimed yet more victims and traffic seemed to grow ever worse. Still, amid the tide of oft-tragic happenings, small rays of hope keep shining through. Here are a few of many stories worth sharing on a day of feasting, family and friends. They’re enough to remind that it’s still worth saying: “Oh, Thank Goodness.”

Ironically, it was last spring’s massive Alaskan oil spill that convinced Deborah Sutton of Van Nuys that the environment can be rescued by small personal steps. Now she looks back at it as a gift--the gift of awareness.

“It was a real motivator for me--it just turned my mind around,” she says. “It’s all very overwhelming, but if we start out on a small scale, and look to ourselves and our own area, we can deal with that.”

A native Californian who had watched the quality of life here steadily deteriorate, Sutton had felt herself alternating between pessimism over the magnitude of air and water pollution problems, and anger at the government--city, state, federal--for not doing something about it.

“You keep waiting for somebody to pass some laws.”

Sutton, 38, a legal secretary who works in her husband’s law firm and the mother of a grown son, had been doing a lot of reading about the environmental crisis. “It left me feeling useless and out of control, that there was nothing I could do to help.”

She was starting to wake up in the middle of the night feeling guilty. “I’m not a joiner or an activist, but I was getting more and more depressed.”

Then, last March, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, dominating the news with its 10-million-gallon oil spill. The pictures of oil-fouled waters and beaches and oil-soaked sea birds and seals were a catalyst for Sutton.

“It was so massive, there was such an incredible amount of damage, that it made me realize what the problem really is. It’s how much oil we use as consumers, how voracious our appetite is, how eager the oil companies are to give us what we demand, even if they have to take shortcuts, because we won’t wait.

“In a sense, I thought, we were all the captain of that ship. We all have to take some responsibility for what happened, because it started with individual action.”

If the problem started with individual action, she decided, so could the solution. She did some consumer research and went to work. “We’re recycling in our house, we take toxic substances to the city’s hazard waste roundups, we’re looking into recycled paper for our office stationery. And I am aware of consumption--whether it’s driving time, electricity use, water use. You notice that as you become aware, you begin to cut back. It’s not an inconvenience to turn off the faucet while you’re brushing your teeth, it’s just breaking a habit.”

There were unexpected rewards, including the discovery that “there are a lot more people than I thought who are concerned and starting to make changes.”

She’s putting together a Christmas letter for family and friends, a compilation of local telephone numbers, addresses and other guides to environmental action.

“I feel so much better now,” she says, “I can’t let go of this feeling. Without being preachy, I want to share it.”