Slate: Eight Week Carbon Diet

There has been a lot of personal soul searching lately. I suppose part of it stems from espousing the virtue of a "green" lifestyle coupled with the constant bombardment of realizing the impact and breadth of why I decided to study and become what I have. Recently I have had the chance to feel the sort of motivation needed to finally sit for my LEED exam and have been exposed to a work environment that is allowing me to finally carry on the sort of conversations about social responsibility and design, history and language that has been missing since I left the safety of the academic womb that was University.

I suppose another cause is realizing that I am finally reaching an age where the path that I begin to take should be one that I deliberately set and if I am sure upon what I feel I need to do then I should knock off the screwing around and actually do it. It isn't as if there is an awful lot of sacrifice involved.

Alas, that could actually be the problem.

I could go on and list my blessings but instead I will keep this moving along the semi-profession vein I attempted to set when I started this blasted thing. Last week sometime it dawned on me that I miss some of the simple pleasures such as cooking and experimenting with food, growing vegetables and herbs and generally studying cities. I made some bold statements such as "I will attempt to begin a 150 mile diet in Cleveland in the winter" and "I will cut my carbon footprint".

The diet is taking some time. I admit I am almost at a total loss of where to start. Google, I suppose will help a little bit, and there is research, which scares me a little bit. Oh, what horrible truths will I learn?

Cutting the carbon footprint should be pretty easy, especially when there is the possibility of PRIZES. Slate e-zine is trying to motivate some of us to go on a large scale 8-week carbon diet with the goal of individuals cutting their carbon footprint by 20%. I know this might not sound that hard, but it is going to be winter and 8 weeks takes us into 2007 (criminy, I can't remember to even write 2006 on checks...), with all the cold weather, horrible bike riding weather, bundled up cold as the dickens weather we can possibly stand to bear. This means more car driving and idling as it warms up, furnaces and space heaters on full blast, dark afternoons with lights blazing huddled in the living room watching the TV or hunched over our computers, and hot cocoa. Lots of electricity for hot cocoa.

It won't be easy but I will try it. I am a sucker for a free T-shirt and Treehugger.com is a co-sponsor and I secretly think I want their approval.

So if you are up for a challenge, one that can encompass every aspect of your life from home to work and everything inbetwixt while attempting to do something better for the world maybe you too would like to try to win a free shirt and join me on the carbon diet. I swear, the spokesperson is cooler then Jared.