Footprints

Last year at my work someone showed me the sight that we were suppose to look at that calculates your carbon footprint and puts it in perspective to the earth. I remember that living in Davis, my lifestyle had already changed a lot from basically never driving and only flying home for the breaks. That was were I differentiated myself the most from the average person, which I was again after going to coolcalifornia.org. Using coolcalifornia.org is not as easy to understand and things are a bit more ambiguous. But what I did understand was that if everyone could bike around most of the time, it would easily drop peoples percentages, but the only way to make it convenient for people to bike or take transportation is to design cities around the bike and public transit instead of the car and the over-implementation of free-ways. So it is hard to say if I will be able to stay below average in the transportation portion of the calculation, but that only means that people who don't have a lot of choices on how to get to work or school can and should make that active choice to be below average in another category, like shopping and eating.
Lately, after our waste discussion, I have already tried to reduce the amount of landfill items I am purchasing, and making the extra effort to re-use the things that can not be broken down easily by the earth. If everyone made an effort, it would become standard, just like seat-belts. All the car companies thought it would be more expensive and make them loose tons of money because they had to put in a seat-belt, but it ends up saving people more money since less people are less likely to get hurt, insurance stops having to spend as much, and the chain reaction may not be immediate but it is there, and when people decide that less wasting is standard, there will be an immediate chain reaction in a positive direction.