Last year was a good one for me, environmentally speaking -- I took a hard look at what changes I could make in my everyday life that would have a positive impact on the environment and I committed to at least try them. Nearly all of them were surprisingly easy to do or only mildly inconvenient; my hope is that the ones that were onerous will some day be made easy by new techniques or technology or a change in my temperament.
Here's what I'm focusing on for 2009:
1. Eat less meat. Reducing the amount of meat I eat has been on my mind since I read Mark Bittman's Rethinking the Meat Guzzler and Putting Meat Back in Its Place articles, but I haven't actively been trying to change my eating habits. I tried to eat vegetarian in college and only lasted a few weeks, so I know I can't give up meat entirely -- but I can eat less. (By the way, Mark Bittman's recently revised How to Cook Everything cookbook is fantastic. His approach is simple, his recipes are manageable, and everything we've made so far has been delicious.)
2. Buy less stuff. We more than tripled our space when we moved out of our tiny apartment and into our suburban house, and one day recently I realized that it was becoming full of stuff. I had to be smart about buying only what we needed when we lived in our apartment and diligent about getting rid of things that were no longer used, but the increased space of our house changed everything. I could hold onto things just in case we might need them, I could buy things because they were on sale, I could allow the mountain of toys to grow. But when I thought about my new habits in environmental terms, I realized that I'd become a mindless consumer -- and being a mindless consumer is wasteful. So for 2009, I'm aiming to buy less. (Another book recommendation: Peter Walsh's It's All Too Much is insightful and offers easy ways to reduce clutter and organize your house and your life, primarily by buying less stuff.)
3. Be even better. And finally, I want to keep learning about my impact on the environment, keep trying to reduce that impact, and continue with this blog so that I don't get lazy.