Gradually green

For this week’s column, I thought I’d preach at you about something, well, environmental, for a change. Recently, I read an article about how Quarter Pounders and top sirloin are destroying the environment, and I thought that would be perfect to discuss. It turns out that annually, massive animal feeding operations release into the atmosphere more than 100 million tons of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s about 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. As far as my column’s call to action, it would be fairly straightforward: go vegetarian.\nI’d then send my column in, get paid massive sums of money for it and sit back knowing I had done my part to save the world. Of course, berating our readership for eating too many cows would be easy for me, since I already happen to be vegetarian. If that were not the case, it would be a lot harder for me to preach at our readers, since it would be nowhere near as simple to follow my own advice. Honestly, as much as I enjoy feeling that my vegetarianism is helping to green our world, environmentalism was definitely not the impetus behind my becoming a vegetarian in the first place. If I remember correctly, it was a combination of peer pressure (one of my best friends was a vegetarian) and a highly disturbing episode of “The Simpsons” in which Lisa becomes a vegetarian (think “hot beef injections”) that did it. I’ll admit, then, that I have no right to expect others to do the same without batting an eyelash.\nIn a movement that asks concerned followers to initiate so many personal lifestyle changes, everyone must make his or her own choices about setting goals that are realistic. There is no such thing as “all or nothing” in this case, and this is one of the reasons I hate to hear people call environmentalists hypocrites.\nI’ll concede that it is a basic tendency for people to say one thing and do another. For example, though I’ve written countless columns on reducing reliance on cars and advising readers to walk instead of drive, sometimes I catch myself considering driving because it’s cold out or because I’m just feeling lazy.\nA very important consideration in any such movement is to realize that people are not saints. Personally, I was horrified when I heard about the massive energy consumption of the Nashville mansion owned by Al Gore, the “homeboy” of environmentalists everywhere. But no one is perfect, and considering the lifestyle changes “going green” entails, he has done an amazing job. I’ll take his half-assed efforts over the more common no-assed efforts of the rest of the world’s population.\nWe’ve all got to start somewhere, and even if that somewhere is not at a Greenpeace or PETA conference, we need to remember that even the most minute of efforts can bring about massive changes.