This Good Life.

When you have a passion for the environment, you spend a lot of time reading newspapers and website stories on environmental issues. As you dig deeper into things, you begin to understand the inter-connectedness of the world around you. How fossil fuel addiction has generated drought in Africa. How coffee-fueled poverty has leveled rain forests. How the pill giving us the sexual revolution has possibly led to a cancer revolution. And as your awareness grows, so to does a nagging sense of disquiet. Like the hair on the back of your neck standing up just before a really strong summer thunder storm. Like that storm, the disquiet gently grows out of a whispered gust that naggingly tugs at the edge of your attention. A gust that you fuel with more information, more knowledge. A gust that gains power as you delve into the hot topics in the green movement, growing in power and fury until finally you feel like you're containing a Katrina-sized hurricane of mixed frustration, fear, horror and despair over the state the world is in. All that pent-up emotion, that fear, forces you to DO SOMETHING, to shout out, to pick up garbage and carry it home, to glare with undisguised fury at any SUV that passes by, and to generally be an annoying, preachy, long-haired, granola-crunching, doom-proselytizing, tree-hugger.

I blame my parents. And my wife. My mother and father started me on this road by inculcating a reverence for the outdoors at a very young age. They provided the nagging disquiet. And my wife, well...

When I met my wife, she was the one that first nudged my nagging disquiet inland, toward warmer topics. She saw in me the same forces that were gathering in her. As we first dated, then got married, our two growing storms (albeit hers a much more advanced version than mine) merged and began to feed off each other. Now we push each other to new levels of eco-fury, swapping energy back and forth so that the two of us become almost rabid in our green frenzy. We have become eco-guerillas, rushing out of the cover of nearby shrubbery to frantically toss the litter of stunned picnickers into recycling bins before
shouting "Overthrow the Disposable Regime" and dissapearing back from whence we came.

We're probably pretty annoying to our friends.

And that's how I got here. Writing this blog. My wife and I are trying our hardest to live an ethical life. We've moved beyond a "green" life. I mean, what good is buying certified organic Cocoa that was picked by a 5-year old cocoa slave in some plantation. The plants may be free of pesticide, but the turmoil generated from such an unjust socio-economic system will do far more damage in the long term. And that is just one example of many. Every decision we make in life has ethical, and planet changing, consequences. Do you buy local, but pesticide laden vegetables, or opt for organic ones transported from a long distance? Should you run out and buy CFL light bulbs for every fixture in your house, or continue to use the incandescents until they burn out, then replace them with CFL lights? Do you shop for gifts or clothing at a fair trade store that provides income for the citizens of developing nations despite the fact that their products may have a high environmental price tag (not counting the petrochemicals it took to get them to you)? Do you go on that much-dreamed of eco-tourist working vacation (say rescuing sea-turtle babies in the Mediterranean) or stay at home and not spend the petrochemicals? Where do you turn for answers?

Can't help you there. But what I can do is tell you what we've found out, and what we've decided to do. I'll try to document every step we take on this ethical path, this good life. Sometimes it may be the wrong step. But, hey, we're learning here. A couple of average Canadians looking for their ethical ground. And that's the whole point of the thing. To learn what you can do to make the little changes. Make enough little changes and the big changes will take care of themselves. See you on the road.