So I thought as a good first step in trying to be a green home owner I would calculate my carbon footprint. Turns out that is not so easy. I would love to include everything we consume during the day to make this calculation like the fuel needed to get a strawberry to my local supermarket and then to my house, but that seems to be pretty hard to obtain. So for this first stab I thought I would just try the simple calculator at The Nature Conservancy.

Turns out I have big feet:

Compared to most folks in VA we are doing pretty good, but like most American’s we are not doing right by the rest of the world. In my next post I will discuss improvements we will make to our house to reduce our carbon footprint. In the meantime, I’m taking suggestions.

Once upon an eon ago I graduated college with the idea that I would never live in the burbs.  I had lived all my life in and around New York City and believed the burbs to be an awful waste of everything including our natural resources. Flash forward eight years and I’m living 30 miles outside of Washington, DC, in a burb where life without a car would be nearly impossible. How did this happen? I still think burbs are an awful waste of space, I do not enjoy commuting to DC every morning, I do not like having to drive everywhere, I dislike malls and strip malls, my heart aches for culture within walking distance.  Yet my wife and I bought a house in Manassas, VA. Why?

We simply could not afford to live comfortably closer to DC.  We plan on starting a family soon and could not find a safe, large, condo/coop near DC that we could actually afford.  Don’t even get me started about finding a community near DC that had decent public schools.

Now that we are here, there are some benefits to live in suburbia we have noticed. My wife’s commute, (she does research/works in Front Royal, VA) is much easier. We have two dogs that love to run in our backyard, and walk to the local big community park.

Despite the good points to the move I still feel guilty about my own perception that I have turned my back on my green ways, that I’m a total hypocrite for moving out here. However, Manassas will be our home for the next five years so I can’t wallow in self loathing. I gotta be as green as I can be.

This blog will be many things: a place to learn about emerging technologies that will bring us to the point we are no longer a threat to this planet, a place to learn about what different individuals, communities, whole countries are doing to be green, a place to learn what individuals are doing to be green. However, and I admit this is quite selfish, it will also be a place where I can exercise some of my guilt by posting what I’m doing to make my family’s carbon footprint as small as possible.