SIMON WOODS, who is 6, would like to play on a baseball team. His mother, Sharon Astyk, is sympathetic, but is also heavily committed to shrinking her family’s carbon footprint. “We haven’t been able to find a league that doesn’t involve a long drive,” she said. “I say that it isn’t good for the planet, so we play catch in the yard.”
That is one way that Ms. Astyk, a mother of four, expresses her concern for the environment. She has unplugged the family refrigerator, using it as an icebox during warmer months by putting in frozen jugs of water as the coolant (in colder weather, she stores milk and butter outdoors). Her farmhouse in Knox, N.Y., has a homemade composting toilet and gets its heat from a wood stove; the average indoor winter temperature is 52 degrees.
Many people who can comfortably use “carbon footprint,” “global warming” and “energy offset” in a sentence will toss a bottle or can into a blue recycling bin and call it a day. Those who are somewhat more committed may swap incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, rely on cloth shopping bags and turn to mass transit.
Then there are people like Ms. Astyk, 36, a writer and a farmer who is trying, with the aid of a specially designed calculator, to whittle her family’s energy use to 10 percent of the national average. She and her husband, Eric Woods, a college professor, grow virtually all their own produce, raise chickens and turkeys, and spend only $1,000 a year in consumer goods, most of which they buy used. They air-dry their clothes, and their four sons often sleep huddled together to pool body heat.
They began this regimen in 2002. “My husband and I started to talk about climate change, and oil prices were going up,” Ms. Astyk said. “The other factor was a justice issue. There was a great disparity between the resources used by the third world and by us, so we decided we had to cut back.” Some people may view Ms. Astyk and her family as role models, pioneers who will lead us to a cleaner earth.
Others may see them as colorful eccentrics, people with admirable intentions who have arrived at a way of life close to zealotry. To others they come across as “energy anorexics,” obsessing over personal carbon emissions to an unhealthy degree, the way crash dieters watch the bathroom scale.
Ms. Astyk has heard such talk but says her neighbors’ attitudes have softened as energy prices have risen. “People have moved gradually from ‘Sharon is a fruitcake’ to ‘Sharon is a fruitcake who might make some sense,’ ” she said.
Jay Matsueda, who might also answer to the name energy anorexic, or carborexic, has neither heat nor air-conditioning in his condominium in Culver City, Calif.
He runs his car, a 1983 Mercedes SD Turbo, on waste oil from a Los Angeles restaurant. When he gives a gift, it is usually an organic cookbook, a copy of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth” or reusable bamboo flatware. “That way, people don’t have to accept plastic cutlery at takeout places,” said Mr. Matsueda, 35, who wrote in an e-mail message that he occasionally relieves himself on his lawn in order to “save a flush.”
Although he concedes that there is “sometimes an impracticality” to habits like filtering vegetable oil for fuel, people do view him as part of the mainstream, he said. “I’m not perceived as a very radical guy,” said Mr. Matsueda, the marketing director for a company that manufactures compact fluorescent bulbs. “People will say, ‘Jay’s doing it, and he’s normal.’ ”
How normal? Mr. Matsueda lives the sort of life that the public relations firm Porter Novelli recently called “dark green.”
The company conducted a poll of 12,000 people, examining their commitment to various environmental practices — reducing energy use at home, buying energy-efficient appliances, boycotting companies with bad environmental records. Seven percent earned the top designation, dark green.
Some people who organize their lives around carbon emissions do so in a private way, aiming to help the planet, and secondarily to influence friends and relatives. Others want to prove a point in public, including several who are pulling stunts.
David Chameides, a cameraman in Los Angeles, is collecting all the waste he generates in a year in his basement, and keeping a blog that describes his detritus. A sample entry (from Oct. 6, Day 279 out of 365) includes “1 bag of hair from haircut — put out on lawn for birds,” “1 plastic wrapper from ice cream — garbage” and “2 aluminum tuna cans — recycle.”
Similarly, Colin Beavan, a writer in New York City, is working on a book and movie, “No Impact Man,” about the efforts that he and his wife, daughter and dog are making to spend a year without harming the planet. “In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets ...” he has written on his blog.
Not even Al Gore recommends such privations.
The former vice president, who is cited as an inspiration by some carborexics, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit group that sponsors the We Campaign. On that campaign’s Web site — wecansolveit.org — the advice is fairly prim: turn down the heat and air-conditioning when you aren’t at home, wash your clothes in cold water, pump up your tires, car-pool at least once a week.
The utility company Con Edison goes a bit further, offering more than 100 tips on its Web site. Among the less intuitive: take showers rather than baths, replace light switches with dimmers or motion sensors, don’t preheat your oven when you broil or roast food, cover liquids in the refrigerator (“uncovered liquids make the refrigerator work harder,” Con Ed says).
But nobody recommends reusing the same plastic Ziploc bag for a year, as Anita Lavine and Joe Turcotte, a Seattle couple, have been doing. When their two toddlers come home from preschool, Ms. Lavine scrubs the Ziploc bags that hold their soiled clothes and biodegradable diapers, and uses them the next day. She does the same with the plastic bags that hold her children’s apples “and random lunch stuff,” she said.
Whatever the weather, Mr. Turcotte, who is 40, rides his bicycle 16 miles a day (round trip) to his job at a health care foundation. Ms. Lavine, 35, who works for a company that makes DVD games, keeps the thermostat at 60 and is about to acquire three chickens. They’ll be welcomed for their eggs, their willingness to eat food waste and for their ordure — a nice addition to the family’s compost heap.
“My friends,” Ms. Lavine said, “think I’m the craziest person they know.”
Not everyone thinks that Ms. Lavine and her ilk are crazy. “What these people are doing is fantastic, needed and catalytic,” said David Gershon, the author of the book “Low Carbon Diet” and founder of the Empowerment Institute, a consultancy that helps people and communities reduce energy consumption. “Some people are in the vanguard and show what it’s possible to do,” he said.
When one half of a couple is less zealous than the other, it can be a strain.
Mr. Matsueda, the Los Angeles marketing executive, said he once broke up with a girlfriend who owned a Ford F-150. “It drove me nuts,” he said. “It was this big truck she took all over town with nothing to haul — she just didn’t get it.” The relationship, he said, ended for other reasons, but her choice of vehicle “didn’t help.”
To some mental health professionals, the compulsion to live green in the extreme can suggest a kind of disorder.
“If you can’t have something in your house that isn’t green or organic, if you can’t eat at a relative’s house because they don’t serve organic food, if you’re criticizing friends because they’re not living up to your standards of green, that’s a problem,” said Elizabeth Carll, a psychologist in Huntington, N.Y., who specializes in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Certainly there is no recognized syndrome in mental health related to the compulsion toward living a green life. But Dr. Jack Hirschowitz, a psychiatrist in private practice in Manhattan and a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said that certain carborexic behaviors might raise a red flag.
“The critical factor in determining whether something has reached the level of a disorder is if dysfunction is involved,” he said. “Is it getting in the way of your ability to do a good job at work? Is it taking precedence over everything else in your relationships?”
People who adhere to a strict carbon diet say there are some sacrifices they are not willing to make. Ms. Astyk acknowledges that she sometimes buys new books and toys for her children — and that being the mother of four might even, to some, call her eco-credentials into question.
To her detractors, she points out that her children still receive Popsicles, Cheerios and the occasional new toy. “We let them have sugar and we let them watch television,” she said. And while she mainly shops at yard sales, “I do buy some new books. I’m not pure. I use Amazon.”
In part, she said, her family is living out a sort of futuristic experiment. “What does a life with less energy look like?” she said. “It’s fun to try to get the most out of the least. It’s like a party game.”
