BallotVox

Environmental Choices

[thingermejig / Flickr]

“Green” has become a buzzword for everything from lightbulbs to high rises, and with the greening come choices about personal behavior. Thirty-something Boston Gal from, yes, Boston, Massachusetts, wonders how much difference one person can make; but she decides it’s worth trying to be environmentally friendly anyway (hat tip to Misa Dayson):

I don’t know if my personal choices are really helping the environment or not. I can’t measure how many millimeters of glacier ice I may have helped save by turning my thermostat down a few degrees this winter or just how much smaller the landfill pile is because I recycled my Diet Coke cans.

What I can measure is how much lower my heating bill was last winter when compared to the winter before or how much my coin jar grew after redeeming those Diet Coke cans. When I plant my container gardens in the next few weeks I will see how much my produce bill goes down as I harvest food from my backyard. I will see how much my gasoline bill drops as I walk to the local shops for errands.

Not all my choices will have an immediate monetary benefit. I am now using reusable cloth shopping bags for my groceries instead of paper or plastic. My grocery store of choice does not credit me a few pennies for doing this, but I still do it. I think making the small initial change, like replacing those lightbulbs with CFLs is good advice. Hopefully seeing the money savings that one very small, very simple change provides will spur you to make the next change, and then the next.

To me, it is all very much worth the bother.

This growing prevalence of this attitude may explain why McCain, Obama, and Clinton all take an environmental stance that’s considerably more aggressive than the current administration’s.