Making changes in these areas of your life has a guaranteed impact on water pollution, air quality, global warming, and habitat preservation -- positive or negative depending on the sort of change you make.

The specifics here are not going to surprise you. Cut down on driving, live close to work, take mass transit when possible, walk or bike when you can, buy the smallest car for your needs, and advocate for transit alternatives in your area. Personal cars and trucks really do spew pollutants, from birth through death.

It turns out that food-purchasing choices are important as well as faddish. If we cut down our meat consumption and buy organic when possible, we will also be reducing our consumption of land and water and our contributions to the pollution of both. We can begin to implement positive daily food and transit changes now, in big or little steps.

Influential changes at home are going to be long-term projects, especially the decision about where we live -- ideally in the smallest house for our needs, close to our work and shopping. Of course, if this is not your current situation, you'll have to wait until it comes time to move. Your other foci at home should be energy efficiency in the home itself and large appliances within it.

Now, my personal thoughts about activism: It doesn't necessarily mean picketing Shaw's Supermarket. At its core it means magnifying our influence on public policy and our immediate community via whatever tactics are at our disposal. It is imperative to phone legislators, donate to environmental groups, plant school gardens, speak at the synagogue, do whatever we can to incorporate environmentalism as a permanent consideration in all decisions. Conscientious shopping is not equal to or a substitute for environmental activism.

This material obtained from Umbra Fisk in an article in Environmental News Network (December 31, 2004).

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