Sharpening my pencils…

shades of green

Originally uploaded by scienceduck.

… and looking for ideas on how I can turn up the green without turning up the suck, too. A friend of mine suggested to me yesterday, “You know how you can REALLY help the environment? Start writing letters to China.” He has a point: maybe switching from regular kitty litter to soy-based kitty litter (is there soy-based kitty litter?) isn’t going to have a worthwhile impact in the long run. But for the same reasons I convince myself that my vote counts, I’m going to convince myself that my daily attempts at being an ecophile count, too.

So if anyone has any recommendations, thoughts or suggestions for something I can do, a product I can switch to, a habit I can change, feel free to drop an email or comment — to be honest, I’m starting to think 365 is a very big number, and writing posts about how I’m eating more swiss chard just isn’t going to cut it.

Kermit was probably right…

… when he sat down on that grassy knoll and crooned, “It’s not that easy being green.” But he actually wraps it up on a note of optimism: “Green can be cool and friendly-like / and green can be big like an ocean, or important like a mountain, or tall like a tree.”

If there’s anything I learned from Sesame Street, it’s that you can always trust a frog (and also, large birds frighten me). So after years of turning my nose up at hemp this and tempeh that, recklessly throwing plastic water bottles in the garbage and blowing my nose with entire sheets of paper towel, I’ve decided that maybe, as long as I’m not too self-righteous about it, I can make my life a little greener and hopefully not lose all my friends and family in the process.

Starting as of March 1, 2007, I’ll be spending each and every day finding some way to minimize my ecological footprint — whether it’s a big thing like giving up my car for the weekend, or a small thing like switching brands of toilet paper — and then I’ll write about whether it was easy, challenging, or seriously made me consider buying a Hummer for the sole purpose of running over the nearest hippy.

I hope you find this blog helpful/amusing/procrastination-worthy — just remember, I’m pretty green at going green, so forgive my whining when it comes to Day#276 and I break down, drowning myself in sweatshop-special hoodies and unfair-trade coffee.