Is there a Darth Greener in your life?

There's a new buzz word out there in the E-community: "Dark Green."

It is used to describe people who have taken the mantra of reduce, re-use, recycling re-think to whole new levels of, of, of I don't know what.

Here at The Thin Green Line, we like to think of ourselves as pretty environmentally aware.

We recycle all sorts of stuff.

We drive a hybrid vehicle.

We walk when we can and use re-usable bags at the Giant.

But it turns out, we are children compared to a few, rare Green (not so jolly) Giants bestriding the earth.

Consider the case of Sharon Astyk, who lives in a farmhouse in Knox, N.Y.

Here is a brief description from an Oct. 17 article in The New York Times of what she has been willing to do:

"She has unplugged the family refrigerator, using it as an icebox during warmer months by putting in frozen jugs of water as the coolant (in colder weather, she stores milk and butter outdoors). Her farmhouse in Knox, N.Y., has a homemade composting toilet and gets its heat from a wood stove; the average indoor winter temperature is 52 degrees.

"Ms. Astyk, 36, a writer and a farmer is trying, with the aid of a specially designed calculator, to whittle her family’s energy use to 10 percent of the national average. She and her husband, Eric Woods, a college professor, grow virtually all their own produce, raise chickens and turkeys, and spend only $1,000 a year in consumer goods, most of which they buy used. They air-dry their clothes, and their four sons often sleep huddled together to pool body heat"

When her 6-year old wanted to play baseball, she said no because there was no team close enough to not require a long drive.

We stand humbled at her dedication to the planet (although denying a 6-year-old the opportunity to play baseball doesn't sit quite right. I say this perhaps as a recent convert to fair-weather fandom of those fightin' Philadelphia Phillies. My son adds, "Go PHILS!")

Folks like Ms. Astyk, or "David Chameides, a cameraman in Los Angeles, who is collecting all the waste he generates in a year in his basement, and keeping a blog that describes his detritus. A sample entry (from Oct. 6, Day 279 out of 365) includes 1 bag of hair from haircut — put out on lawn for birds, 1 plastic wrapper from ice cream — garbage and 2 aluminum tuna cans — recycle,” are impressive certainly.

But I sometimes don't wonder if so much isn't too much.

I confess to a certain, subterranean resentment of these super-recyclers because of the ever-present eco-guilt and the self-knowledge that I am never going to have a self-composting toilet in my house.

While some folks might find these examples inspiring, others might find them daunting.

It would be a shame if people looked to examples like this when deciding whether to recycle, or insulate their house for winter or buy organic produce and said "well if you think I'm doing that, forget it. You can just skip the whole thing.

This could well be described as the "dark side of dark green."

You can make an equally good argument for the opposite, people who see such examples and decide to emulate them, but I suspect, being a cynic, that most of us will find pretty good rationalizations for keeping convenience.

After all, I was going to go to the gym this morning, but decided all nine of my regular readers needed a new blog entry more. (My cardiologist, if I had one, would disagree.)

The key of course, is to find a balance between making eco-friendly improvements to your routine and not trying to single-handedly save the world.

After all, you can't do it alone and it actually has a greater impact to have more people do a bunch of little things, than to have individuals do extreme things.

There was an interesting insight into this in a recent edition of the Charleston, S.C. City Paper, in which a handful of people tried to go two weeks without contributing a single item to the waste stream.

The result?

"Between the lawyer and the meteorologist, the outdoor ed teacher and the work-at-home mom, the college student and the City Paper reporter, none of the eight participants made it more than three days without contributing to the waste stream."

Which is not to say the experiment is not worthwhile if, for no other reason, it offered insight into how we live.

Jim Crater at Recycling Services Inc. in North Coventry is truly gifted at this.

He has the admirable ability to look at any given situation and ask, "do I really need to do this this way? Can't we find some use for that?"

Granted, as anyone who has even been the recycling center there knows, it can result in some interesting results.

But the point here is we need to constantly look at the way we do things and ask if we can't do it better. And that's what the dark greens can help us do.

May the Force be With You!