It's Not Easy Being Green: Pedestrian Friendly

Rosie takes her last few steps to carbon independency and in the process finds out she really likes it!

I live in a pedestrian friendly town. Seriously, it says so on the signs welcoming you into town. But I am only a pedestrian while working out. Otherwise, I drive.

It’s not that I am lazy (I hope). I am a workaholic, and I work until the last minute before leaving for lunch or a meeting down the road. By down the road, I mean 2/5 of a mile away. But it’s not like I get so much done in the ten extra minutes I get if I’m not walking to make unnecessarily taxing the environment worth it. It’s a compulsive bad habit I should break.

Here’s why: if all able Americans walked daily for 30 minutes instead of driving, we’d cut our annual carbon dioxide emissions by more than 60 million tons and save more than 6 billion gallons of gas.

So this week, my goal is to walk to everything within 15 minutes of the house. Day one: I pry my fingers off the keyboard to head to the grocery store for dinner’s missing ingredient. I read my Blackberry the whole time. This from a girl who is so unaddicted to her Blackberry that I usually have 200 messages to delete when I look. Day two: I bemoan the cold front while walking to the bookstore. Finally, on day three, I walk to lunch and enjoy it. Tulips and azaleas are blooming. The air is fresh, and I relax into it, joyously aware I’m doing more than reducing my impact.