I live in Chicago but I work out in the suburbs. In the ‘burbs I regularly see the signs of environmental awareness. Houses put recycling bins out each week, the streets are cleaner, some gas stations have e85 as an option, et cetera.

In the neighborhood where I live, on the other hand, I can guarantee that for every power-saving, can recycling, carpooling suburbanite there are at least 3 careless, selfish slobs roaming the streets.

The reality of the situation is that not only do people not recycle in the city, many of them are outright pigs. In December I had to walk past the discarded remains of an entire banquet spread thrown on the ground in the alley behind my house. Someone had literally thrown the leftovers from a large party, aluminum trays and all, on the ground. My neighbors in the building behind me likewise have a strange habit. As far as I can tell, they punish their children by throwing their toys out their back window into the alley where they break upon impact with the ground. Subsequently they are run over by cars and smashed into little plastic chunks. The remains of several toys were lying in fragments just this morning.

The slovenly nature of some of these people is balanced out to an extent by the fact that some of them do not own cars (although the amount of SUV’s cruising around burning $2.65/gallon gas never ceases to amaze me.) Don’t misread my meaning here. There are plenty of environmentally conscientious individuals in the Chicago city limits. It’s just a shame that for every gallon of gas they save there’s some idiot riding around in an SUV in gas-slurping city traffic.

This leads me to ask “who’s winning this battle?” My own effort to be relatively “green” is canceled out by an order of magnitude by my neighbors. I have to conclude that the “green” people are losing but have picked up a good ally in the form of “global warming hysteria.”

You see, I have a rotten feeling in my gut that this summer is going to be a miserable one. 1988 all over again. Drought, scorching heat, brown grass. This is not to say that this will “prove” global warming. It may, however, scare people into changing.

These people who throw their empty bottles and cigarette butts in the bushes, who buy dirt-cheap used SUV’s from the 90’s, who leave soiled mattresses and broken TV’s in the alleys don’t respond to billboards and public service announcements. They respond to fear.

I hope this summer is pretty goddamned frightening.