Thinking Is Required

If you are following the crowd and going green, good for you... but you might want to utilize your grey matter before proceeding blindly toward the light. Yes we want to replace bad environmental habits with ecologically sensitive ones. But this can be accomplished without needless sacrifice.

One of the things that makes it hard to overcome our non-green inertia is the sacrifices that must be made. Don't shoot yourself in the foot by making it more difficult and expensive than it needs to be. Come to grips with the wasteful habits of the past, decide not to continue them, and move on greenly. But do it smartly. Gradual immersion into the cold, green water is much easier to take than jumping in with abandon.

If you have decided that you need to start conserving energy and you must replace your incandescent light bulbs with energy-efficient compact flourescent bulbs (CFLs), you might want to wait until your current supply of incandescents is used up. The environment needs you to make the switch, but it can wait until the proper time. Don't waste your money by throwing away perfectly good light bulbs in order to jump on the green bandwagon. Your investment in incandescents represents a sunk cost and you might as well utilize them. On the other hand, the CFLs will save you a lot of money in the long run, so factor this into your decision.

Another way to help save the planet is to avoid the purchase of paper products when permanent, reusable ones will suffice. But don't throw out all of your paper plates in a misguided effort to promote using china or other permanent dishware. Don't throw out your paper towels so that you can start using cloth ones instead. Those paper products that you have in your pantry are a liability for our forests and our landfills, but sending them to the landfill prematurely does no one any good. Resign yourself to the fact that they will eventually end up in the city dump, but go ahead and get your money's worth out of them first.

The less painful it is to go green, the more sustainable it will be. The more thoughtful you are about new choices, the more likely they will become new habits.

Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry. -Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923