Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried and epically failed at apartment-scale composting. I sure have. Raise your hand if you made the choice to live less than 2km from almost everything you need and yet can still find excuses to drive. It happens to me more than I’d like to admit. Shoe addict? I’m with you.
Compared to some Albertans, I may appear to live a pretty lean and mean green life. Then again, when compared to other Albertans, I probably appear to be some kind of robotic consumer zombie. I guess it's all relative. I like to think of myself as somewhere in the middle along the road to responsible green living. I certainly make conscious efforts to reduce the environmental impact of my lifestyle: I’ve chosen to live close to my workplace, I wear a sweater instead of turning up the heat and I bring my own bags to the grocery store. But on the other hand, I know I don’t always make green choices. And it's not without a healthy dose of Gen Y guilt.
There have been more times than I can count where I’ve felt completely alone on my quest to shrink and green my lifestyle which, considering the vast number of resources (both online and personal) I have at my disposal, seems ridiculous. But it seems to me that there is a whole lot of attention and support out there for super-greenies, the hyper-evolved sustainability superheros that make the rest of our efforts feel woefully inadequate, and the hard-core resisters who just can’t seem to be convinced. There’s probably an infographic out there in the interwebz with the amazing range in between. If you or someone you know has one, let me know. Somewhere in the middle, I'm trying to eek out a greener existence through some pretty ridiculous trial and error.
Now, I’ve never been one to shy away from failure. I’m pretty sure there have been plenty of wise people who extol its very virtue. So I refuse to give up and I hope that through my failure, some other middle dweller can learn with me (and hopefully make less of a mess). Let’s call it my personal green failblog - a journal of failure from which there can hopefully be some kind of reconciliation between my green ambition and flat-out ignorance.
