Green Daily

In a perfect, simple world, all our green choices would come down to black and white absolutes that were obvious and clear. When it came to power, we would have a perfect, scalable solution that was infinitely renewable, cheap, and non-polluting, and we could implement it immediately. While we're at it, all of our waste would be self-consuming, cats would no longer be bloodthirsty, bureaucrats would be helpful, and cars would run for a thousand miles on half a cup of hydrogen peroxide.

In the real world, however, we are rarely faced with simple decisions. Every solution seems to offer another problem, and we often find ourselves weighing costs and benefits with an intensity that makes King Solomon look like a circus clown. One example of this is the question of organic food; when I wrote a post questioning the carbon footprint of organics, I received impassioned comments, both positive and negative. Similarly, posts on nuclear energy, air conditioning, and other hot topics have often received considerable, sometimes aggressive responses.

One of the recurring themes of the green movement is a standing request that people reconsider their patterns of usage, their lifestyle choices, and other ways that they influence the environment. This is a fundamentally worthwhile goal: by asking people to analyze their lives, activists are enabling our current environmental problems to act as a catalyst for evolution. We are trying to change behaviors, change values and, fundamentally, change humanity. This is both incredibly ambitious and unbelievably important.