There’s no place like home

"Hautnah in Hollywood" by Evie Sullivan

I was born in Hungary, raised in Germany and now I live in Los Angeles where I work as an Actor, a Director and a Community Activist. Hollywood is a long way from Budapest but the current green revolution reminds me of the frugal and sustainable lifestyle I experienced as a young girl in Budapest. The motivation then was economic. When we moved to Munich I landed in the middle of another green revolution, this time social awareness drove the commitment to the environment and so it was that I grew up recycling, reusing, and reducing. By the time I arrived in Los Angeles, the “Land of Plenty,” the simple and intentional life was the norm. That’s why I’m especially pleased to again find myself in the midst of another green revolution, this time as Los Angeles shifts from a lifestyle of excess to a landscape of sustainability. It’s good to be home!

I was born and raised in Hungary in the 70’s when the country was under Communist leadership and we lived very tight, physically as well as financially. My father’s apartment was so tiny that my sister and I lived and slept in the same room with my father and his wife. We had a separate kitchen and a small bathroom. When we went to live with my Grandma, we had the same situation, this time living and sleeping in the same room with our Grandma and Grandpa. We also shared the one bathroom, one WC, and the small kitchen.

Space was sparse and there was no room for trash, so everything was reused and what was purchased in glass was taken back to the store, newspaper was collected and recycled for money, other paper wrappings and paper bags were reused and food was bought fresh from the market so we had barely anything wrapped in plastic. There was little waste, we grew up using and reusing, learning the value of things at an early age. We didn’t know it then but apparently we were environmentalists!

In the mid 80’s my sister and I were reunited with our mother in Munich (she had escaped Communism in the 70’s) just as the German government was in the middle of a social engineering campaign that included a full scale recycling program all over the country, in cities, in schools, in homes and on the streets. These were exciting times! I didn’t know the language very well but I knew how to recycle. I could go home from school and teach my new family to separate paper, plastic, aluminum, and glass and I saw the quick change within the city when the new glass separator bins arrived (for brown, green and white glass). These new separator bins turned up at the train stations, schools, public places, and in offices and businesses. The motivation was different but the behavior was the same. Even in a strange land, I knew I was beginning to feel at home!

When I moved to Los Angeles in the mid 90s, I was a stranger in a strange land. The first place I stayed at had a big dumpster. It was almost as big as our home in Budapest! There were hardly any recycling programs, there was a lot of trash everywhere, from plastic bottles to plastic bags, flying in the wind and stuck in the gutters. It was a hard change for me to “become” wasteful. It was very difficult to buy groceries or household items or office supplies that was not either made out of plastic or wrapped in plastic. When I took my own canvas bags to the grocery store, other shoppers looked at me as if I was nutty and when I rode my bike, they thought I must have some drinking problem. Some called me the bag-girl because I reused my sandwich bags, I was looked at in horror when I picked out the batteries from the trash bin, and generally people either laughed about my silliness of trying to be sustainable, or silently shook their heads, not understanding what I was doing.

Within the last couple of years, the collective behavior of those around me has changed, if only in acceptance and understanding of sustainable actions. The media has given more attention to the effects of chemicals in our food and in our homes, they’ve exposed the natural consequences of plastic, PVC, paint, greenhouse gasses, etc. Companies are now packaging their products in smaller boxes and with less wrapping. When I arrived, not even electronic stores would recycle used batteries but now we’re able to conduct neighborhood collection campaigns and recycle everything from batteries and video tapes to hard drives and electronics, recycling them so that the poisonous metals stay out of our landfills. While we’re busy saving the planet from heavy metals, we’ve also revitalized the Industry by giving the A-List another opportunity to brand themselves, this time as Eco-Heroes with their electric cars, their hemp wardrobes and their green-washing campaigns. It’s the least we can do, after all it is Hollywood! Nevertheless, it’s good to be home.

The sustainable life was not and is not easy in America, especially here in Los Angeles, but my experiences in Hungary and Germany left me with habits that are unbreakable, with attitudes that will always result in sustainable choices, and with politics that will always drive me to fight for a sustainable lifestyle, community, and government. It’s how I was raised and it’s who I am.

Last year I wrote and directed a film. At the first production meeting, we made a “no plastic, no Styrofoam” commitment and began a journey that led to the production of a 100% sustainable film shoot that used bikes and public transportation as a main source to get around, deliver equipment and  food, and to get the actors and crew on set. We demonstrated that Hollywood can go Green! Most importantly we started a conversation that is ongoing, a journey that has people asking the hard questions and challenging the status quo. We continue to debate and to discover and that is the most exciting thing about the sustainable lifestyle.

I’m challenging myself every day on how to be green without killing myself and losing the fun. I love to research how things work and how they can work differently. I hope you will enjoy my column and will send me suggestions, questions and tips on how to make our homes and our community livable and sustainable for many generations to come.

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