Shopping to (literally) help save the world

At first, she just brought the bags to the grocery store. Then she started using them for other purchases. Soon she was recycling, composting, buying local food, making more trips on her bicycle and shopping at thrift stores and garage sales instead of Target and the mall.

These days, MacKenzie, who lives in northern California, says gardening and line-drying her clothes have become routine parts of her life. Instead of taking a “huge carbon suck” of a vacation to Hawaii or Mexico, she and her family recently rented a cabin at a nearby national park. Because this is the 21^st century, of course she blogs about the whole thing.

“I guess I just kept feeling like, the environment, it’s not in a great place. I want to have a nice place to leave my kids,” she says.

Kennaugh, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, likes to tell people to start with the small stuff, as MacKenzie did. Swap out your light bulbs for the more efficient kinds. Run your dishwasher only when it is full. Don’t open the oven while you’re cooking. If you live in Colorado and see strawberries on sale in December, think about the carbon output it took to get them to the store.

“Once you do one thing, it’s easier to do another thing and another thing and another thing,” she says.

John Tarantino didn’t even recycle much until about two years ago, when he moved from California to Eugene, Ore., and was struck by the potentially toxic impact of field burning there. Soon, he was volunteering with a local environmental group and meeting more environmentally minded people.

Now, the 24-year-old Tarantino is a hybrid driver who buys his recycled paper towels at the local grocery store and his produce at the farmer’s market and is always pestering his office colleagues to turn off the lights and printers. Lately, he’s even bought a couple of organic cotton T-shirts. (And, yes, he also has a blog.)

“I feel that that it’s almost like a misperception that being green, you have to make a sacrifice,” he says. “Me, I don’t think I’m sacrificing at all. I’m just making different choices.”

His family doesn’t necessarily see it that way, however, especially since his dad is in the meat industry, and Tarantino has given up fast food and meat in favor of locally produced tofu pate and other vegetarian fare.

“Everyone in my family thought I was crazy,” he says.

Still, Tarantino thinks he has been able to go green more easily than others because he is young, single and makes a good living as an electronic engineer.

“I get that all the time: ‘I don’t really think you can do that with kids. It’s a rich, single person’s game,’” says MacKenzie, the northern California mother of two.

But MacKenzie says she hasn’t found it hard for her kids to adjust. In fact, she thinks her kids actually enjoy going to the thrift store more than Target, because there’s so much variety. Her older son, who is 5, has a globe in his room and likes to try to understand where things come from, while her 3-year-old recently expressed mixed feelings about eating a honey stick flavored with watermelon because he knew watermelon wasn’t in season.

MacKenzie also doesn’t think her new environmental devotion costs significantly more money than her old life. While organic and local food can be more expensive, she saves money by doing things like making more food from scratch and buying secondhand items.

It may take more time to go to the farmer’s market than to drop by Safeway, she says, but it’s more interesting.

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