save water, shower with a friend

Somehow that old rallying cry doesn't sound as daring as it once did, but that's okay, maybe it's a good thing that the social revolution made such things commonplace. Now, according to Slate.com there's a corollary:

Are you a real environmentalist? If so, you might want to consider staying with your spouse long after the love is gone. Turns out, divorce is just one more thing that is bad for the environment. The LAT and WP report on a new study that reveals couples who live together use energy and water much more efficiently than those that have split up. In one year alone, divorced households were responsible for using as much as 61 percent more resources per person than before they split. "If you don't want to get remarried," the study's author explained, "maybe move in with somebody you like."

Will this this awareness spark widespread cohabitation by friends who just want to save the planet? Will it keep couples from splitting just so they can reduce, reuse, and recycle their irreconcilable differences? Will it spawn a wave of urban and rural communes populated by green post-hippie post-feminist post-boomers?

I doubt it. Yet it does make strange bedfellows of so-called social conservatives and so-called environmentalists, although the latter are probably the more conservative in a literal sense. And yes, it adds another dimension to the old family-values argument - another phrase that seems to have lost traction - to know that material, moral, and ecological 'values' coincide. In short, breaking up is expensive.