Be (at least some) of the change you wish to see

I'm not an ecozealot. Regardless of what some in my house say, I'm not.

If I really were an ecozealot, We'd never have moved into a building that states in its bylaws that you cannot have worm bin composters. I'd've made sure we bought a place with a balcony, where the worms could live their wormy lives and munch up all my discarded organic matter.

But I'm not an ecozealot, so as soon as I can, I'll buy an electric composter, which uses electricity, and I'll hide it away in the utility closet where children and cats won't play with it and the smells (hopefully) won't bother anyone. There aren't supposed to be smells, by the way. The brochure says so.

I'm a fast showerer more because I find it a waste of time, not just of resources. Our water is part of our assessments, so I have no idea how much we really use, but we run the washing machine and dishwasher and they may be low-water models, but I bet we use our share.

We don't drive much. The car we own gets an average of 45 mpg during the summer, 30-40 during the winter (we've been subzero a bit more than usual this winter, so I've been getting crappier gas mileage than usual), but it's kind of a moot point because we've had it almost four years, and we haven't hit the 15,000 mile mark yet. It's a beautiful car, though--and very good at holding down our parking space.

We use a good amount of electricity--okay, I use a good amount of electricity. I have gadgets, we have two computers, a DVR, a number of televisions, and we're in the north, so it gets dark early and stays dark late into the getting-to-work hours of the morning. During the summer, because we don't use AC, we are well below the national average, but in the winter when we use our electric heat, we're above average for the country--and that's with switching to mostly compact fluorescent bulbs.

When we're being virtuous, we cook at home and bring our lunches. It's a heck of a lot cheaper, and using reusable lunch boxes like my nifty Mr. Bento means that we don't create a lot of Ziploc waste. I like to cook with fresh ingredients, and I prefer organics, so our footprint is smaller than it could be--when we're being virtuous.

When we're not being virtuous, you'd be amazed at the number of food miles, the pounds of trash, and the amount of waste a small family can create. I've seen us fill a kitchen trashbag to the brim with styrofoam and nonrecyclable plastic waste in just one meal when we've got a couple of friends over.

Why the big confessional? Because it's amazing what knowing your footprint and knowing your limits can do for you when you say you want to change the world.

Riot 4 Austerity is a group dedicated to the idea proposed by George Monbiot that if everyone in the first world decreased their resource usage by 94%, we might be able to save the environment as we know it. R4A aims for only 90% (that should be easy, right? Ha! Try it!), but it's a great place to learn a few techniques. They also have a great calculator on the site (this is relatively new, and is much easier than the slaving over a pen and paper I did when I first hit the R4A site a few years ago) that will help you see where you are in terms of the American national average. The group is full of people from all over the world, though, and also people in various stages of light living.

The group has an email forum which is well worth subscribing to if this sort of thing interests you, but it also leads me to drop my jaw more than a few times a month. There are people who are off the electrical grid, off the water grid, off the food grid. There are people who live on farms and get their electricity from cow dung and eat only what they grow in their fields. There are some seriously zealoty people over there. And while I love the group, I am not one of the zealots.

No Impact Man, who I've mentioned before, is also a true ecozealot. He set out on a one-year crusade to be carbon and impact neutral. No electricity (he did use a solar pack to power his computer and charge his phone), no packaged food, no trash, no eating out, nothing. And he gave back to the environment as well, to make up for the fact that he still had to flush the toilet occasionally. That his wife was less than thrilled with the idea is putting it mildly.

I know the feeling--from both sides. While I'm used to taking flak for being weird about my green, I love a good steak. I enjoy going to the movies and having a gigantic vat of popcorn. I'm a consumer. So I consume--a lot. As a whole, we're pretty good at being good, but when we're bad, we're your typical western world family.

I know we're never going to move to the country and buy a farm and use an outhouse and raise our own chickens. I'm allergic to chicken feathers--it would never work. We're not even in a position to buy a single-family home and kit it out with the latest solar gadgetry like the Smart House at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. It's unbelievably cool, and I'd love to live in a place just like it, but it's not actually feasible.

So what do you do? Well, you do what you can--what you will to a certain extent. My partner was horrified by the idea of a composter inside our condo. But we don't have a deck, and we throw away 4 pounds of vegetal waste alone every week (more in the summer), so eventually, the conversation turned from "you are NOT putting that in MY house!" to "okay, but you have to clean out the utility room and call the electrician and take care of the thing." Because it's a little something we can do.

Organic food, and especially local food, was much easier. There's something wonderful about wandering through the farmer's market together, looking at all the lovely food and figuring out exactly how you're going to make use of it. That it doesn't really cost much more than the grocery store, and certainly costs a whole lot less than eating out, is just an added bonus.

I'm the electrical offender in the house, and I'm working on it. And I'm working on cutting down the times on certain other people's showers, too, but again, you make the changes you can. And you keep on trying, because one day my "but I have to have the computer on overnight and I can't go to sleep without the television on" may turn to "I can run that scan once a month, not every day, and a nightlight is fine, really."

No Impact Man talked recently about ostentatious individual action as activism. He makes the point that one person's actions can cause a cascade effect... sometimes.

So, try taking your lunch to work for a week and seeing if people notice. Don't say anything, don't be loud about it. Just bring leftover soup or a ham sandwich or something everyday instead of going out, and see if people notice. If they ask, tell them you love the fact that you're saving some money.

Or try walking into you favorite coffee joint for your morning jolt and using a reusable mug to get it. Almost all of them will fill your mug for the price of an equivalent cup of theirs, and some will even give you a discount. If you're lucky, you'll get a quiet "thanks for using a reusable" from your coffee guy.

Try turning off the lights when you leave a room (make sure no one's still in the room when you do). Try doing it when your kids are around, and when they ask you why you're always doing that, tell them simply "to save energy." If our children can grow up thinking that saving energy is the norm and not the exception, they'll hopefully do it themselves.

What each of us does has an effect on other people. Live a little more consciously, and maybe others will see the difference and want to be it, too.

Now if I could just dump the soda habit! That would make a BIG difference!