Ready, Set, Green Week One - Thinking Like a Treehugger

So we recently bought the book Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living by Graham Hill and Meaghan O'Neill. A basic treatise on how to greenify your life in eight weeks, each week focuses on a certain aspect of one's life.

So, finally getting off our lazy duffs and getting around to doing it, I picked it up and thumbed through week one: Thinking like a Treehugger. I had specifically bought this book to go through a "checklist" of items which we could work on, since I have a checklist mentality. The book's format for this is very simple and very easy. Each chapter starts with an introduction, explaining the facts, the reasons, the statistics. Scattered throughout the chapters are numbers, some pretty interesting, such as "3: Number of hours a television set could be run from the energy saved by recycling one aluminum can." Then, in the back of the book, there is a list (haha!) of things you can do, with various symbols representing which projects are good for your health, which are good for your pocketbook, and so forth. The list is divided into two handy sections: "Save the Planet in Thirty Minutes or Less" and "So You Want to Do More," the division being in difficulty and amount of commitment in the project.

This first chapter is self explanatory, but the nice part is they don't make you focus on guilt, which is what one would first assume is the first step for environmental consciousness. "Just think of all the beluga whales you are killing by not recycling your paper", the headlines scream. "Beluga-what?" the majority of America is asking.

No, the basic mindset is use less and make what you have go longer. Try to avoid waste as much as possible. Avoiding excessive packaging, making raw materials go longer with recycling, and avoiding dumping out food which takes space in a landfill and takes an unnecessarily long time to decompose by starting your own compost bin are some of the suggestions given. Good ones, too.

Quinton and I were talking about this before, and Dantzel and I have been talking about it frequently as well: the American lifestyle and dream really isn't sustainable. Owning several houses and driving a giant SUV is all fine and dandy for a few rich people (well, not really) but if everyone is doing it (and everyone is trying to do it), we just can't sustain it for very long: economically, environmentally or otherwise. "Less is more" will most likely be the new mantra as we head off into the beginnings of the 21st century (we're not even 1/10 of the way there!) and being the trend setters that we are, we want to lead the way.

And so, we've decided to take the challenge. Throughout this week, we will be posting one activity we've been doing or done under the list of things at the end of this week's chapter. This week is the introduction; tomorrow will be the beginning of our project summaries. So go forth, be green, and feel immense amounts of guilt about the environment.

Why aren't you crying about the beluga whales yet?

Consider it revenge. Cold, sweet revenge.