It's Not Easy Being Green: Making a Difference or Making Myself Feel Better?

"I'm starting a compost pile," I said, carrying an old planter filled with vegetable scraps and orange rinds.

As Dan watched me walk by, his brow furrowed in confusion, I added, "And I don't care what you say."

"We don't have a garden," Dan said.

"We have herbs and flowers and houseplants," I countered. "And I might start a garden someday, especially if I have a compost pile."

"That seems a little backward," Dan said with a resigned sigh.

A few evenings later, Dan approached me with an apple core and a plateful of cherry tomatoes.

"Should I compost this?" Dan asked.

"You sound kind of excited about my compost pile now, Mr. We-Don't-Have-a-Garden."

"I mean, do you want me to compost this?" Dan asked again.

And that's just one way I adjusted my wasteful ways and attempted to single-handedly help out the environment.

I suffer from tremendous guilt - a byproduct of being raised a Baptist preacher's kid - in just about every aspect of my life; my impact on the Earth's gradual destruction is no exception. If you were to ask me, I would probably take personal responsibility for the melting of the polar ice caps and the Gulf oil spill.

So I am constantly making minor (but not too inconvenient) lifestyle changes, thinking I am playing a major role in saving the environment. Then I read or hear about someone else making more significant sacrifices than I, and the guilt returns until I've taken on my next pet project.

A few years ago, Dan and I started swapping out our incandescent bulbs for fluorescent even though the aura in my house now resembles a high school gymnasium. (Only 2 percent of American consumers recycle fluorescent lights which results in the release of the dangerous neurotoxin mercury into the atmosphere from U.S. landfills, another issue to consider when making the switch.)

We have been using reusable grocery bags for a while now. Then one day, Dan announced that some study had found that it takes more energy to manufacture a reusable bag than a plastic one.

"Of course," he continued, attempting to appease me as I started to hyperventilate, "if we use our reusable bags for a few decades, it should pay off."

Dan's favorite environmentally/socially conscious phrase is, "We're voting with our dollar," an appropriate comment for my quiet husband who likes to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

So, taking his statement to heart, I turned into an anti-technology zealot who would not allow her poor techie software engineer husband buy an HDTV or a smartphone because of the prolific use of conflict minerals in the electronics industry. Then we bought a camcorder at my request, and my hypocrisy reared its ugly head once again.

"It's for my students' programs," I rationalized.

As an act of contrition, Dan and I spent an entire afternoon researching companies that had signed contracts agreeing to recycle electronics responsibly instead of shipping them overseas to be dangerously disassembled in developing nations.

We have also been buying locally and organically as much as possible (or when convenient). Once we watched Food Inc. and read Mark Bittman's ominous statistic that 18% of greenhouse gases are caused by factory farming, Dan and I began eating (almost but not quite) vegetarian. (Dan admits he is the world's worst vegetarian.)

So the question is, do my seemingly insignificant lifestyle changes make a difference, or do they just make me feel good and possibly (but hopefully not) smug about my contribution to the Earth's posterity? For every positive change I have tried to make, I have encountered naysayers who say my lifestyle choices don't make a difference at all. Some have even gone so far to say that my attempts at environmentally friendly living might actually be detrimental.

But I keep making small, slightly neurotic choices in the hopes that indeed (as eloquently stated in an article at ecology.com), "every large-scale social change begins at the grassroots level with individuals who are willing to change their own behaviors as a model for others."

Still to come:

April 22: I'll talk about my obsessive recycling habits and how those have caused me (mostly good-natured) derision from fellow Idahoans on more than one occasion.