Managing Your Carbs: A Learning Process

I’m a big believer in awareness being the first step to correcting a problem. After discovering what a carbon footprint is, using a carbon footprint calculator to determine the size of your particular imprint, its time to start thinking: “what can I do to make this situation better?” Because no matter how hard you try, you can’t eliminate your carbon footprint overnight and you must understand how offsetting is a great stop gap between awareness and complete elimination of the problem.

Offset is a game of tit for tat, of losing and gaining, of finding balance. For everything you take away, you should give something back. And there’s nothing wrong with being creative about the whole thing. For instance if you are a big paper consumer, maybe planting trees could be your thing. Maybe you don’t have time to plant trees. So paying someone else to plant trees for you could be your thing. Maybe trees are not the way to go at all. Maybe energy reduction is your thing. Maybe you can’t really reduce your energy output anymore so maybe you could help pay for someone’s else energy. Maybe you could support a fund that provides clean energy to people or maybe you could start building windmills.

Maybe a lot of things.

This whole offsetting business is quite involved. There are so many ways to restore a sense of balance to our lives and to the planet as a whole. Reading about what is happening to the planet may be another way to go for some of us. Learning about global warming, how it occurs and what can be done about it. Education is a good second step after initial awareness of the problem. It’s all about choice.

There is a great freedom in being green because there are so many ways to do it.

Managing carbon is the same for me as managing carbohydrates. Something I know I should be doing but sometimes it’s hard and seems an unattainable goal. But I know its good for me in the long run. So I make tiny changes and concentrate on learning what I can do. Cut out a cookie here, walk past a cupcake there and slowly start realizing the effect of my good choices.

Awareness. Education. Balance. Change. Reward.

Whether reducing or offsetting, the management of carbon is a learning process. Realizing we have a lot to understand and research is a good start.