A Natural Grace

by Dee Wade

Descriptive, declarative sentences do the best work. But at this moment I take a turn toward the directive. If it offends, I apologize. And my instructions could be wrong for you, wrong for the times, or just plain wrong. But I must speak them. They are simple, really, and come in two parts.

First, go ahead and buy the fluorescent bulbs. They're good for you. Second, buy them from your neighborhood, locally owned and operated hardware store, if one still exists in your corner of the universe, or some other similarly situated establishment. But whatever you do, do not buy them from the World's Largest Retail Corporation.

I find it at least ironic, if not all the way cynical for the World's Largest Retail Corporation — let's call them Mega Mart, so they won't sue us — to sway its customers to buy fluorescent compact light bulbs for home use, as opposed to the more standard incandescent light bulbs we have known. With great fanfare, they rolled out this program as if they were the original Friends of the Earth. Excuse me, but Mega Mart is about as earth friendly as a river of battery acid. It would be like a coal company that practices mountain top removal trying to gain points by running their earth-scarring equipment on solar power.

I'm confident that the people who manage the World's Largest Retail Corporation launch this lighting initiative with the best of intentions. Fluorescent light bulbs are beneficial because they use 75% less energy and last ten times longer than their incandescent counterparts. Even though they cost more at the outset, over the life of each bulb, the consumer saves $30. If more American households used compact fluorescent bulbs, millions less kilowatt hours of electricity would be needed. That means cleaner air and less ravaged land from strip mining.

Mega Mart trespasses against proper care for creation in several ways. The most obvious occurs as they enter an area, establishing presence on the outskirts of town. Their footprint likely covers once productive farmland with acres of rooftops and asphalt. As they gain more and more of the local market's business, they build another, larger complex on the other side of town, wrecking more farmland. In some cases, this move happens more than once. The earlier sites are abandoned to sit empty or under occupied for years. The discarded buildings, never much to look at, now become huge eyesores. How many country sides have been blighted by this business pattern? Far too many.

Then there is Mega Mart's effects on the local business community. Is it me or do these people harbor a hatred for Main Streets and town squares? Are they shrewd entrepreneurs, predators or vultures? If the people in charge of Mega Mart really possessed a green attitude, they would break their Multi-National Corporation into many little pieces, selling them back to the local merchants they put out of business when they blew into town. That would allow complex economies of sustainable scale, in small towns and cities, to flourish again. As it is. Mega Mart is a monopoly. They control prices, product design, product quality, distribution of goods, prevailing entry-level wages, benefits packages, and working conditions. Entirely too much power has fallen to them. Monopolies used to be illegal in this country, and should be now, because they quickly devolve into tyrannies, regardless of their owners' good will. Tyrannies are good for no one, not the rulers, not the ruled, and not the land, air, and water they use.

Several years ago I was sitting with my father-in-law watching a basketball game on television, and a Mega Mart commercial came on. It showed this irritating little animated corporate logo knocking down already low prices to even lower ones. "Every time I see that," he said, "I think that somebody just lost their job." He was right, of course. And this was before the textile industry in this country was exported wholesale to overseas sweat shops. That impulse, often dressed in the emperor's clothes of "Globalism," is an old, antidemocratic temptation of society. You can always find somebody to do shoddier work at a cheaper price. People seem ever eager to sell themselves short. Or perhaps we should recognize that conditions force near-slave wages.

If all a culture cares about is dollars and cents, it gets what it pays for: ruined communities, ruined economies, ruined land, devalued labor, devalued people. Real costs are thus covered up by the exploiters and future generations get stuck with the tab. The human soul cannot grow in love and faithfulness to God and neighbor when it is bought and sold on the cheap.

Our faith teaches that since God is sovereign over all, all matters to God, including the relationships between various parts of the whole. Mega Mart can sell cheap clothing, electronics, toys, and every plastic object imaginable because people in China work for a few dollars — if that — per day. When the Chinese wake up and ask for more respect, there will probably be other Asians ready to take their place, or maybe it will be Africa's turn to participate in this modern form of indentured servitude. The ironies spinning off that turn of events gives the mind whiplash.

Oh, and guess where most fluorescent compact bulbs are made? You got it: not in America, not with American pay scales, benefits, and environmental standards.

The house we live in was built in the late fifties - early sixties, during a time, apparently, when fluorescent tubes were being pushed by lighting designers. And we've installed compact fluorescent bulbs in selected lamps and ceiling fixtures, too. The Scottish Puritan in me likes the financial and electrical thrift of fluorescence.

But another part of me squirms in their efficient glow, and a New York Times article by William L. Hamilton explains why.

In the first place, fluorescent lighting has an industrial and commercial feel, popular as they are in factories and big box stores like Mega Mart. It also reminds one of the office cubicle and of places where people tend to wait, for doctors, dentists, the school principal, and, possibly, one's parole officer. Fluorescent lights make one think of the boss, a cheap motel, or a government bureau. Not all that cozy and homelike,

Then, too, fluorescence works against an ancient pull of nature. From the beginning, our species has been strongly attracted to the light of the sun, the camp fire, and the candle. A bright light radiating outward from the core has been imprinted in our hearts, minds, bodies as the source of both warmth and illumination. An incandescent light bulb does that very thing, with its filament in the center burning with electrical fire. It's a torch, and we like torches.

In contrast, a fluorescent bulb emits a dusty, diffuse light. It has no filament, no wick, no center, just an evenly glowing gas. Incandescence works from the warm, or infrared end of the spectrum, while fluorescence works from the ultraviolet or cool end. Under its influence, skin looks harshly exposed. Blemishes seem magnified. Furthermore, it lacks any hint of romance. I can't imagine reading a story about the hero falling in love with a woman whose face was caressed by 30 watts of Sylvania cool white fluorescence.

I am convinced of the unbroken line between beauty and truth. What is genuinely pretty compliments the genuinely moral; the authentic confirms the artistic. Form and content, content and form; both are consequential.

If I may return to the directive, I'll repeat the lesson. Buy and use those energy-saving, pollution abating fluorescent bulbs. But don't buy them from Mega Mart or any other monopolistic, landscape-pillaging, town-centre-killing, job-destroying Large Retail Corporation. Buy them from smaller concerns owned and operated by someone you have a chance of knowing personally. Don't, however, replace all your old light bulbs. Because when you want to cast the ones you love in the best light possible, put them under the warm, primeval glow of centrally fired incandescence. Best of all, light a candle. Now. Don't they look good?

Dee Wade is Pastor at Anchorage Presbyterian Church, Anchorage, Ky.