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At Blue Egg, we're firmly committed to the notion that being greener doesn't have to be a lot harder than the way you're already living. In fact, the only part that's difficult at all is changing your old habits and sticking with the new ones. And the only confusing part is knowing how to get started. That's why we spend a lot of time asking ourselves how we can help others to begin. So we recruited two people who, like you, reside somewhere in the gray-green area of eco-friendliness. Meet Maryhope Howland and Ethan Rutherford, a couple of twenty-something grad students on a budget who've recently moved in together. Until we found them, Ethan and Maryhope were enjoying long, thoughtless showers, produce imported from Chile, and rambling weekend drives just for fun. Over the course of two summer months, they chronicled for us their efforts to live more sustainably in ways that would go easy on their sanity, their bank accounts...and their relationship. In these daily dispatches, you'll find the honest, sometimes discouraged, and often hilarious musings of our friends Ethan and Maryhope, a pair of newly minted environmentalists. We hope you find inspiration in their story-and perhaps the nerve to start a similar journey yourself.
-The Editors As I'm typing this, the sun is beginning to cut through the clouds, some kind of tree across the street is in bloom, birds are twittering, and-I'm not kidding here-"Fanfare for the Common Man" is playing on WGBH. This is not a real day. This is a Norman Rockwell day, the kind of day you read about but know doesn't really exist. But here it is, almost comically perfect in its quiet splendor, and so far away from Al Gore's predicted "nature hike through the Book of Revelations" that one is tempted to say, "Aw, it'll all be all right. There's no way the planet is headed toward ecological apocalypse." Except that...well, it is. How do I know this? Because the evidence is all around us. Ice caps are becoming memories. Polar bears are drowning. A single flight across the Atlantic generates as much carbon as the average motorist does in a year. These facts are overwhelming. And for the last few months, I've been experiencing a sort of low-grade depression about it, skipping straight from the stage of denial (or indifference) to despair. It's a sensation I'm used to: I've got an unbroken streak of voting for the losing presidential candidate; I've been ineffectual in halting war; and now, without even knowing how or meaning to, I'm killing the planet. About two months ago, and after many hours of listening to me drone on in an uneducated and apathetic way about the "end of the world," Maryhope sent me an article from Vanity Fair, "Fifty Ways to Help Save the Planet." And what we realized is that, while we had the desire to do good for the planet, we didn't really know how. But as it turns out, there's this thing called the Internet. With lots of information on how to shrink your carbon footprint (a good thing to do, we learned). Some of the steps are ridiculous and out of the question for us (e.g., harvesting wind power in our little apartment), but many are doable. We found a few online carbon calculators and plugged in the requested information. Although the results were all over the map, they all agreed that we could do better (way better in some cases). So our goal is this: to change our daily habits, reduce our shared carbon footprint, save a little money, and be better to the planet without becoming ascetics. No Impact Man, while impressive for his commitment, is not a realistic model for us or for most people we know. Crash diets are unappealing and unsustainable. Better to begin by walking around the block a few more times, if you know what I'm saying. We're a couple in our late 20s, grad students on a tight budget, living in a borrowed house in coastal Massachusetts for two months before we move to Minneapolis. This environmental gusto also happens to coincide with our living together for the first time after months of maintaining a long-distance relationship. Making these changes together may grease the wheels of cohabitation, but we're aware that it may also conjure a whole new category of things to argue about. Either way, we will be balancing this newfound concern for the environment with our financial and emotional limitations as we make decisions about buying a car, not flushing (as much), and converting to CFLs. Like most people, we want to do the right, enviro-friendly thing, but we're also concerned with how much sacrifice making the right choices will entail. These dispatches are where we will explore this balance and chart the progress of our commitment to being better planet-dwellers. It's an attempt to assuage guilt, to take responsibility, to do good. To try to contain an overwhelming fact by asserting a little control in the way we choose to do things. Also, we will probably argue a lot. More soon,
Ethan and Maryhope
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