It can be difficult to be green. I feel you should start at home because you cannot control kids at school to be green but you can encourage it.

We live as green as we can - we have for as long as my husband and I have been together. Having a child has challenged us - the whole how to cope with the demands of living with a small child v's the planet. We also live in apartment - it's tiny but we have a small garden. The most "controversial" thing we have done is use cloth nappies - we use 'modern cloth nappies' they work pretty much like a disposable made of bamboo with press studs and then a cover over the top. http://www.babybeehinds.com.au/www. When I tell other Moms that I use use cloth I seriously get incredulous stares like I'm some huge martyr for the environment or something. They aren't that hard people! You wash ALOT when you have a small child - these new nappies only require a quick rinse before a regular wash so for me they aren't any extra work - also I don't use them exclusively - if they aren't dry or if we are out/traveling we use disposable nappies. That said - I believe this green stuff only works if you can do it easily - there is no point committing to stuff that doesn't sit with your lifestyle yet.....

Who gets $4 chicken?!! You darn Americans and your cheap food. You have no idea how good you have it. That's extra money you could be spending on... well, me. I promise I'll put it to good use. In all seriousness, I believe we are stewards over the earth and I don't want to be introduced to the turtles and such that my garbage killed. Anyone interested in going green should buy the book Green For Life by Gill Deacon. It's is jam packed with awesome, bite-sized info and places to buy healthy, green make-up and all kinds of stuff. Google it.

goodness, this is a good topic. It IS expensive to Go Green - like Dooce was saying, when it comes to $12 chicken VS $4 chicken, I can't spend 3 times as much on groceries trying to take care of the enviornment. Eric and I walk to the store though when we can - we dont waste, we do recycle and maybe one day when we dont care about money, we can care about going green more :P

Interesting to hear Alice talking about the footprint of home-ownership -- one of the underdiscussed benefits of living in a city is that it becomes much easier to reduce your footprint, as townhouses insulate one another (reducing heat/AC costs), transit means you can give up your car or rarely use it, and wires and pipes need travel only a short distance to bring us utilities. That makes me feel a little better about the other big footprint-increaser: a baby, with all the additional trash, laundry, and other waste that she has brought into our household! Looking forward to the end of diapers, although that won't be the end of the chaos and waste, I'm sure. (Can we talk about the light-switch game?! sigh.)

Here's what I always wonder about as I wash my baggies to be re-used - is it more wasteful to throw away plastic, or to use water to wash it? We've been recycling for decades, but I use a fair amount of water to wash food away from glass or plastic containers before recycling them (don't want to attract rodents). There's a big water shortage in California. Which should I be more worried about?

Going green is great! I hate being wasteful and love being able to do my part to keep our trash down. I try to buy organics simply for the fact that they're better for our bodies to digest. The closer to the natural foods you can get straight out of the ground, the more nutrients you absorb, which is awesome. Unfortunately, our neighborhood we live in doesn't recycle, they don't even have trash pick-up service! Has anyone heard of that before?! Thankfully, where we live is about 10 minutes from a site where they separate out trash from aluminum, glass, plastic, etc. and do recycling. The best thing about that is it costs less than $3 to take in a whole month's worth of stuff. However, I'm one of those people who don't believe in global warming. I studied meteorology in college (the science/research part, not the tv part) and I don't know what's changed in 6 years (other than Al Gore's backing), but when I was studying this stuff, global warming was just a simple scientific theory that couldn't be proven. If you look at the records throughout our history, the earth periodically goes through times of warming and times of cooling. It took what, 4 years or so to warm 2 degrees and in two years, we've cooled back down by a little over a degree. If it was truly global warming, we'd keep heating and then go through an ice age. Think of the last ice age our planet had. We weren't here with all this CO2 pumping technology. Also, if they were so truly concerned with global warming, why don't they plant more trees, grass, shrubbery, and plants and stop cutting down the rain forests? All of these take CO2 in and convert it into oxygen, making our CO2 production less of an impact.