Kermit lamented the difficulties of “being green”. God knows he had enough on his plate trying to deal with Miss Piggy without the added pressure of green-phobia. The nasty remarks by people who couldn’t see past his top-to-toe greenness to discover the kind, loving frog inside. I have a lot of empathy for the little guy, I know the pressure of trying to organise a bunch of people who don’t want to be organised and seeing the best-laid plans turn to crud despite your hard work!

The weekly photo challenge this week is Green (hence the reason I ended up thinking about my mate Kermit – there is a logical sequence – even it is only clear to me). When I went searching for “green” photos I discovered I had quite a few.

It seems there is plenty of green in my life! Which got me thinking about how “green” my life is in the environmental sense. (Try to keep up people, I know I’m wandering, it’s early in the morning). So I googled to see if there was a calculator that would tell me whether I was environmentally friendly or not. The first one I found judged my ecological footprint as requiring 5.28 earths in order to sustain it. Anyone up for a bit of space exploration – we’re gonna need a bigger planet! I immediately hid the results of that one (can’t have Hippie Child discovering it – we would never hear the end of it). In my defense I would like to say that my footprint averages in EVERY area were below the country average EVERY time. Which probably just says that Aussies are all using the dryer too much and are building oversized houses.  The second one gave me a cute little avatar and I halved my result – this time I was only using up 2.5 earths. If I give up meat altogether and buy products with less packaging I can get it back to 2.1 earths.

Does anyone else struggle to be “green”? We recycle, we have a compost bin, although we do have a tendency to forget to use it. We don’t buy lots of new stuff (the lounge is circa 1988 and creates serious back injury every time you sit on it, the bed is circa 1889 and leaves us aching every morning). We don’t eat a lot of red meat since the heart problem. We have solar hot water. Two large rainwater tanks which flush the toilets and water the gardens. Our vegie patch is soon to be resurrected – winter,  hungry kangaroos and deers saw a failure in the last crop. Luckily we weren’t relying on it for survival.

We desperately want to purchase a grey water system, solar panels and a wind generator (we are at the top of a hill, even if the sun disappears the wind blows a gale-force, we could generate enough electricity for the entire town). I am currently lusting after a Prius V. But that all takes money. Realistically, how much money would it take to set yourself up as completely sustainable on a typical suburban block?

What would it take to get my result down to only needing one earth to support my hedonistic carbon producing lifestyle?

How green is your life? If you have managed to cut down your carbon footprint how did you do it?

And just to finish off the green theme – here’s my buddy Kermie.