My Blog is Carbon Neutral

Addictions come in all shapes and sizes.  I grew up, not surprisingly, in a family somewhat addicted to food.  Someone special to me is struggling with his addiction to cigarettes.  There was a time when I was being taken off (doctor-prescribed, necessary) pain killers that I had been on 24/7, for 10 months; never did I so harshly realize the power of a body’s addiction.

And then there are the new addictions of our time: addiction to our blackberries, our macbooks and PCs, our facebook and twitter and the thousands of other social networking sites that we spend more time with than our real friends.  Or spend outdoors.  Or reading a good book.  Or discussing politics.

I am horribly guilty of all these things, most especially since I embraced the food blogging world and all the networks that go with it.  Just look at my sidebar.

But now and then you stumble on a cause, through the blog-of-a-network-of-an-email, that makes you stop and think, ‘yeah, I can do that‘.

Enter MY BLOG IS CARBON NEUTRAL.  An initiative started in Germany, bloggers and website owners in the U.S. do what I’m doing – write a short article about the initiative and post a badge on their site – and a tree will be planted in a fire-devastated region of northern California (currently Pumas National Forrest in the northern Sierra Nevadas).  Technically, the amount of CO2 the tree absorbs neutralizes the amount of CO2 that it takes to power the maintenance of a blog.

I don’t really care about those numbers.

I join this initiative and tree gets planted in a place that needs it.

Simple.

My boyfriend teases me about the little things I do in hopes that they neutralize some of the consumption I abuse by living as I live.  I sponsor children in other countries, donate to various food banks and charities, use only biodegradable paper products and natural cleaning soaps.  I know that overhead consumes a lot of the money I donate.  And because I can’t contribute a lot, my monetary contributions are meager, sometimes seeming to be so little that I wonder how much of my money is actually helping.

But I’m addicted to little steps.  And when it comes down to it, that’s not a bad thing to be addicted to, huh?