So, I think the intellectual portion of this column is winding down. I’ve pretty much spanned the green universe, describing how different aspects of one’s life can be made more environmentally friendly. The one major area that I haven’t quite addressed adequately is probably the most important step in one’s personal adventure towards green living: making it a priority.

I have chosen to make environmentalism a high priority in my life, and it shows in nearly every aspect of how I live on a daily basis, from the food I eat, to how I get to work. As I’ve stated before on this site, I am lucky (in my perspective) to have been able to establish my own self worth and personality relatively early on in my emotional development, and that provides a strong foundation for beginning to care about other things besides getting my own needs met. Sadly, I feel that the majority of queer people don’t have that same luxury.

My father celebrated a birthday recently, and when I started thinking about a gift, I started considering the environmental impact of gift-giving for the first time. (Writing this column has green on my mind, it seems.) After thinking about it for a while, a familiar expression came to mind: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

There’s something interesting about humans, or it might just be Americans (I can’t find any documentation about this.) When someone hands us something, we take it. It’s pretty amazing. If you’re at the office right now, find something lying around and walk up to a colleague (hopefully one who likes you) and hand this thing to them. When they ask you what it is and why you gave it to them, tell them you’re doing an experiment. I’d actually LOVE for everyone reading this to get up right now and try it. Share the reaction you got in the comments.

Again, someone hands us something, we take it. It is illustrative of a common economic principle that things have value (or utility) and you’d rather have something than not have it.

Thank you so much for your efforts over the past few years to make environmentally friendly products and services. Unfortunately, you simply aren’t doing enough. I’m sorry to break the news to you in such a public forum, but you have to learn this somehow.

I’m sorry to report that we American can see a greener future than that which you’re currently plotting for us. We need more, and we need it now What am I talking about? Let me share an example with you.

I’m going to take a different approach to today’s column. Normally I start from the environmental perspective and then (stretch to?) connect it to queer culture or mainstream gay culture. Today I’m going to take a recent personal experience connected to modern gay culture and then stretch to make it an environmental issue. Hopefully the stretch won’t be too, um stretchy.

I hate fancy. I hate luxury I hate premium. I hate executive. I hate, and I say this as strongly as possible, all of these expressions of excess that have permeated our American lives. It used to be that a house in the suburbs and a nice Caddy were signs of success. We’ve taken this further, flaunting our excess through obvious, ostentatious expressions of wasted resources. Modern well-off Americans squeeze their hulking frames into disgustingly oversized luxury SUVs to walk their dogs around the block. Well, not all of them, but you get the point.

Interesting responses here in last week’s Reproduction Poll. A plurality want children, a large percentage definitely don’t, and maybe one-third aren’t sure. There’s an interesting contradiction here in the replies, though. While the largest percentage of people want to have kids that are a genetic combination of the DNA of themselves and their significant others, passing on their DNA is the least likely reason for wanting to have children. Perhaps people are concerned that they can only truly love their own biological child, but maybe they think their own DNA isn’t necessarily special enough to be passed on to a new generation.

When I sliced the data a little deeper, I found no correlation between gender identity and a desire to have children. Both male and female respondents wanted or didn’t want children, and the two respondents identifying with non-binary genders were split 50/50 on the desire to have children.

I mentioned in an earlier column that there are three major ways that the products we consume cause damage to the environment: production of products, consumption of products and disposal of products. Today, I’m going to rant about the urban litter problem for a bit, which is firmly nestled in our environmental damage spectrum between the consumption and disposal of products.

The majority of litter that I come across is food packaging. Small, single-serving packages cleverly designed to spotlight a product’s compelling aspects, highly engineered and air-tight to ensure freshness, shiny and colorful to catch the eye. If food manufacturers spent as much time thinking about product’s packaging after the product is consumed instead of before, we wouldn’t have a problem. However, packaging designers only think of two things: how to convince someone to purchase the product and then ensure that the product is good/fresh enough to be purchased again. Very rarely is the end of the packaging lifecycle considered when it’s designed.

 The results are in on our latest poll: what TNG readers eat. On the diet question, there were four “other” responses, three were pescetarian, and the other was “mostly vegetarian”. Keeping those in mind, we have 6 who eat no meat, four who eat some, and 11 who have meat as a regular part of their diet.

I’m currently home sick, recovering from a tonsillectomy. For those not familiar with the tonsils, they are glands that hang out in the back of your throat and help prevent nasty bugs from infecting your respiratory system. They also have a tendency to get infected, in some people more than others, and are often removed surgically from little kids who get regular throat infections. I used to get throat infections all the time as a kid, but for some reason my doctors decided to remove my adenoids, the tonsils’ cousins that hang out in the back of the sinuses, but not my tonsils. In my adult years, I have been repeatedly getting throat infections and my doctor decided it was time for my tonsils to go as well.

I was pretty apprehensive about getting this sort of surgery, but not for any of the usual reasons. See, I have some strange belief that modern medicine is for the weak. Or rather, that most illnesses are preventable through good diet, exercise, and avoiding toxins. I maintain an excellent diet, get ample exercise and only appreciate the fun toxins in moderation. Therefore, I should be a healthy person. But I’m not. I’m a weak person. A person who, save for modern medicine, should be dead by now.

Last week, I discussed the environmental impact of transportation, and made the connection between where people live and how they choose to get around. I also asked you to tell me where you live, work and plan, and how you get around. The full results of the survey are below.

Brief summary: 80% of poll respondents live in urban places, 80% work in urban places, and 89% hang out in urban places for fun. It’s no surprise then that 91% of the respondents choose public transit or non-motorized modes of transport for both work trips and trips for leisure. It appears the TNG readership (or the self-selected sample who reads It’s Easy Being Green) have the transportation and land use connection figured out and live and work in urban places that are navigable without private automobiles. Fewer cars means fewer greenhouse gases, less pollution, less roadway run-off, and less blacktop.