Eco-guilt

[Alex]

I will admit that I haven't made any huge sacrifices but we try to make the obvious relatively easy choices.

We use CFLs. We live in the space we need rather than the space we can afford (we need a 700 sq. ft. apartment, we don't need a 3,000 sq. ft. house). We bought the most fuel efficient car that fills 90% of our driving needs rather than a car that can accommodate the other 10% (when those 10% arise most of the time we can manage -- you'd be amazed how much Ikea furniture we once crammed into a Festiva and still managed to get us both in the car to drive home -- and if we can't then we rent something for the specific use). We moved so that it is not necessary for either one of to commute to car by work (Lani can walk to work in three minutes; I can get there with public transit in a way that isn't horribly slower than driving). Temperatures have to reach significant extremes before we use heat or AC (our internal apartment temperature is generally well into the 90s before we turn on AC and we haven't yet used the heater since moving into our current place). We don't use fireplaces even when we have them.

But we do other things that we really shouldn't. We could do a lot more to shorten the transportation chain on our foods with just a little bit more effort. We eat too much pre-packaged manufactured food. We pretty much have three computers running 24/7. I buy three 20 oz. bottles of soda (diet) a day because that actually reduces my consumption over buying aluminum cans in bulk (or not drinking it in the first place). We've been told the garbage company that collects at our apartment handles recycling on their end so we made no real recycling efforts.