Ed Begley: Living with Ed 10 green tips
October 7, 2007
Living with Ed, HGTV’s new reality television show chronicling the life of the Begley family, is as much about green living as it is a voyeuristic view in learning how opposites manage to come together in a marriage without it turning into an uncompromising War of the Roses.
While Ed complains loudly about how loud his wife turns up the answering machine volume, Rachelle rolls her eyes at her husband planning his birthday party by choosing to bake tofu brownies and slurping his solar oven-cooked lentil and vegetable soup at his birthday dinner celebration.
As a married couple, Ed and Rachelle Begley are a study in contrasts and a lesson in how very different personalities with differing priorities converge into a union that somehow works. For all their nitpicking and critical review of the other, if you watch long enough, you realize this union of opposites is bonded by humor and genuine respect.
For the rest of us, the Begley marriage may be a metaphor for the overall future in the movement of green living. The era of affluence and conspicuous consumption is a challenge to convince the masses to overcome and finally leave behind, integrating into a simpler style of life that is healthy for all of us and healthy for the survival of the planet. Between the two extremes, is a less-contentious transitional middle, and if we can find it, we may find our way to living a life that sustains life.
As is true in the life and success of any marriage, it is about identifying priorities. When it comes to how your mate squeezes the toothpaste, it is better left alone. There are, and will be, more important issues to tackle, and expending energy on that which can be overlooked is a strategy depleting the willingness needed for more important challenges in compromise and change. As we watch Ed and Rachelle make little forward progress in agreement when they focus on the less significant issue of telephone volume, we also see that on the larger important matters of green living they join in eventual agreement.
As an environmental activist, Ed walks the walk as he rates being a pedestrian on foot as his first choice in transportation; rides the city bus; drives an electric car; and lives in a modest solar-powered house in an unpretentious neighborhood of Los Angeles. Definitely not the Hollywood celebrity lifestyle of striving for an Elmer J. Fudd millionaire, mansion, and yacht status in a symbolism defining fortune and fame. For all of Rachelle’s initial scrunched-up facial expressions of bafflement and discord, she is living with Ed as greenly as Ed.
Living with Ed airs Sunday evenings. Check HGTV’s Living with Ed webpage for more information about the show and to read Ed’s Top 10 Tips for Going Green.
