Day One Hundred and Seventy-Five - You're The Earth Day, You're The Earth Day, You're The Earth Day Boy Or Girl

So, yay - Happy Earth Day! That one grand day when everyone cares about our fair planet, including my favourite DOOL stars [that's a lie, I have no favourite DOOL stars]. These days, we are bludgeoned with uber-annoying Earth Day messages for an entire week - so if ever you needed a reason to turn off your TV, there you go [again, I'm lying - don't ever turn off your TV]. I thought long and hard about some great thing I could do for Earth Day, but honestly I've been there and done that. I've planted trees and adopted animals and composted - so I decided to do something pretty mundane and I determined my carbon footprint.

I find the phrase carbon footprint to be annoying [though no more annoying that adapting the word "green" to everything], however I was able to find a new spin on things as I found a Toronto-specific website to determine my level of environmental horror. Turns out that at 7.1 I am less horrific than most of my fellow Torontonians. This is mostly because in the last calendar year I haven't taken a single flight - take one trip to Europe and your carbon footprint is bigger than Paris Hilton's real one. Which I think is pretty unfair, but it's something that is consistently mentioned as one of the most horrible things one can do. There is not much more I can do to reduce my carbon footprint, aside from eating more local foods and buying less packaged goods. They also seem to love organic food, but that is a bit of an untruth as organic food can actually cause more environmental harm if, for example, you are buying organic strawberries from California instead of the non-organic ones from just north of the city. Also, living in an apartment is limiting - I can't install a solar panel or use Bullfrog Power or really control anything about how my home is heated, cooled, watered and electrified. I can't even hang out my clothes to dry.

The sad fact is that there are no easy solutions. Most of the things that are going to do the most to save the environment will be difficult and wildly unpopular. Just as I don't want to give up on taking a holiday by plane other people don't want to give up their cars or give up eating meat or start composting. I have had people tell me this week that even using our green bin and recycling is too difficult and they instead choose to send all of their waste to landfill. Inspiring!