Suburban Green

Canadian home educating blogger Billi-Jean, who writes at My Bountiful Life… announced a new project for Earth Day yesterday (our own earth is white and frozen, so there wasn’t much celebrating in our little corner yesterday):

Suburban Green Is People

In her first post, Billi-Jean writes,

So here we are, a family of four, in the suburbs in a town sandwiched between two Big Cities, surrounded by freeways and where long commutes to work are the norm. Is it possible, here, where the neighbourhoods are designed as if cars live in them instead of people, to make *real* reductions in our consumption of resources and production of pollution? … To make tangible, measurable differences?… To do more than drag a Blue Box to the curb every week and consider that to be enough (all the while knowing that it isn’t… Not really)?

I believe it is possible. I’m just not sure how to go about it, beyond those easy things we cling to so we feel better. We have always tried to be more conscious and have developed earth friendly habits that I would consider successes, but there have been a lot of failures too and so many options that we’ve never even attempted. Part of the reason that so many of us have less success than we’d like, is that the information about which “green” habits really work for families and actually make a positive difference for the environment is scattered, misleading, polluted by advertising and, to be honest, trite.

(If the blog title rings a little bell, see if you can remember any of the movie clips that aired the other week to announce the death of Charlton Heston.)

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