make a smaller ecological footprint

DoggyMommy, Laura, and I walked to Intermezzo on Tuesday instead of driving, which is good b/c short distance trips put out lots of pollution!

to deichert’s party.

So I don’t have to drive any extra driving!

We had dinner at the Thai place right by the house instead of the one we usually go to intown. Prob 2 miles of driving instead of 25-30. It would have been better to walk, but we wanted to get home before Darrell so he wouldn’t be locked out of the house.

On Saturday I carpooled to a party and made my husband take the car that gets good gas mileage (about 29 mpg vs 18 for the other car) to make the 60 mile trip to pick up his son.

I got some info at Home Depot today about window replacement. My windows are shit. They’re single pane, which doesn’t insulate at all. I also got some more compact fluorescent lights at Sam’s today, so pretty soon I’ll have most of my incandescent light bulbs replaced. It’s not much, but it’s something.

The Earthscore booklet made me see some other things I do that I didn’t think of as environmental. For example, being a vegetarian has a HUGE envirnomental impact because I don’t support the whole industry which includes transporting meat, animal waste, etc. Also, I drive an old car and just manufacturing a new car has a big environmental impact. So by not replacing my car very often, I improve my environmental impact.

Instead of driving to the store (which is about a mile away), I walked. Since I was going for cookie dough and I DO have the goal of losing 10 pounds, I figured walking would do double duty.

At Simpleliving.net there’s a great resource called Earthscore (the direct link is http://www.simpleliving.net/resources/resource.asp?sku=BESCORE). I ordered it (it’s $5 plus $3.50 shipping) and it’s a great little guide. Officially it’s a quiz to help you quantify your environmental impact, but it also has a lot of information. For example, I always wondered whether flying is better than driving, ecologically speaking. I learned from the Earthscore book that flying is about the same as driving a car (by yourself) that gets 27 mpg. It also explains that driving short trips in your car on a cold engine emits more pollution so my first goal is to reduce the number of short (under 2 mile) trips I take on a cold engine.

Hope this helps everyone! I’m really excited about it!