Getting Green Guilt

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I want to be smart about my own impact on the environment. I do. I recycle. And reuse. And reduce. But am I doing enough? Really? Do I really buy the best products that could positively affect the environment? Or am I ignoring some wasteful habits out of convenience? I frequently suffer with green guilt and then wonder how I could do a better job at reducing my impact in a realistic way.

It seems I encounter a few roadblocks while trying to be smart about getting green. The first being convenience. Recycling is easy enough – I can sort and push my goods out to the curb every other week. Done. And certainly convenient. But taking all my plastic bags back to the store to put them into that special bag collector thing is not. So I forget. A lot. But I counter balance that by having brain washed myself into using cloth bags now. It took will and force and sheer determination to keep turning my kid crammed cart back around, out of the store and over to the car to fetch my forgotten bags. Plastic bags are more convenient. It would have been so much easier to just shrug and promise I’d bring my cloth bags next time.

Cost takes its toll on my green guilty conscious. The “organic” section of my grocery store is nothing to scoff at cost-wise. Moms with fancy bags and well dressed kids push their carts through there. Many choices are significantly more expensive than their processed, generic, easy to find counterparts. But I tentatively push my cart through too. Can I stretch my budget for the free range chicken this month? Knowing that could grab a bag of twice as many frozen breasts for half the price? Free range only wins some of the time. Shameful, yes – but unlike convenience, cost is a much great influence on my sometimes less than environmentally friendly habits. Paid bills must win over happy, healthy chickens unfortunately.

Habits play an important role. I spend a large portion of my evening turning lights off in rooms with no one in them. It makes me crazy as I extinguish the lit path my husband has left around the house. But similar to wearing a seatbelt without realizing it, I can’t rest comfortably if my house is ablaze.

I also cringe at turning up the heat or the air conditioning. Do we need it? I check those gauges regularly. And water too. I can’t leave the water running while I brush my teeth. It is a preposterous idea and one even my children’s programming scoffs at. But I let the water run while I shave my legs or while I let the water heat up before I jump in. Convenience has trumped that habit, I’m afraid. More shame.

It seems a matter of simply thinking about what we do during our day and how we can affect change in a realistic way. I can’t afford to get solar panels put on my roof but I can reduce how much electricity we use by flipping switches obsessively around my house. I begrudgingly need to buy gas for my car but I can try to reduce how many back and forth trips I make over the course of my day. I started out always forgetting those cloth bags but habits are in place finally, and I grab them over 90% of the time.

So I do what I can to curb my green guilt. It certainly won’t ever dissipate entirely because I know there is so much more I could do.  But I try to go easy on myself as a mother with a limited budget, over scheduled life and kid crammed shopping carts. I will do what I can do – and do it well enough.

Do you have a guilty green conscience? What do you do to curb it realistically throughout your day?

Caroline writes about parenting, politics, pondering and panicking about it all at her own blog Morningside Mom.

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