Diane Carman is director of communications at the School of Public Affairs, the University of Colorado Denver. She is a former columnist for the Denver Post.

excerpt:

“Dad wore his clothes until the pants were shiny and his shoes until they
could no longer be resoled, and I never saw a no-deposit, no-return beer
bottle in the house until after the old man died.
If anybody had measured his carbon footprint, it would have been a
fraction of mine, as I pursue the life of a twenty-first-century carbon-calculating
eco-consumer in earnest. While the eco-consumer of my dad’s era
was defined by what he didn’t buy—which was essentially anything that
wasn’t absolutely necessary—subsequent generations have embraced the
philosophy that almost any challenge can be met by hypervigilant shopping.
Now, I may not be as nuts as my friends who insist they won’t drink
anything but organically grown coffee prepared in the world’s only solarpowered
coffee roaster—Pueblo, Colorado’s, Solar Roast Coffee—but I’ll
admit I’m a sucker for product with a green pedigree.”