Dave,

The SINS send-up was a fun and productive exercise. Thank you for it. It illustrated the difficulty of living green, and it also showed -yes it did- just how loosely we greenies hold our own values.

Why was this not the lesson?

Greenmark made the same point in an expansive, contrarian and kill-joy sort of way, but you and Carl seem to have taken the argument a flawed step further and have marginalized the whole idea of personal responsibility. This is typical of Carl, who's happier beating the commons with a stick  than looking within for change, but I expected better from Grist.

Rather than letting us off the hook by telling us personal responsibility doesn't really matter, a wiser, more considered (and more interesting) approach would be for Grist to use SINS as baseline to measure its readership, and to use SINS as clarion call for us all to go deeper greener.

It's not too late. Supply the penance.

I tend to agree with your other reader. I did not partake in the sins discussion, fearing I would be labled a party pooper. If I had, it would have looked something like this:

Are the ideas of sustainable living and recycling no more than guilt assuaging self deceptions doing little to preserve biodiversity, and worse yet, are they diverting resources from solutions that would have far greater impact?

For example, to put residential paper recycling into perspective; I consume one 8-inch diameter x 42-foot long tree per year for my "household" paper uses. In other words, I consume in my "household" enough paper to consume one tree that is about the size of a small telephone pole per year. By recycling, I can reduce the diameter of that tree by 1.5 inches to 6.5 inches in diameter. Now, this is conservative because a lot of paper pulp comes from small trees, branches, and scrap wood, the parts that are not useful to the lumber mill that are sent to the paper mill.

Where did I get those numbers? From a spreadsheet I just made. I weighed the paper in our recycle bin and that in our trashcan (a family of four, two adults, two teens) and extrapolated that we use 700 lbs. per year "in our house." I used a ratio of 2.75lbs. wood to manufacture one lb. paper, density of wood =33.087 lbs./cu-ft, and simply calculated a tree volume.

To recap:

I can reduce the diameter of the tree I used for paper "in my home" from 8 inches to 6.5 inches by recycling.

I can save 3, 7, 10, 20  trees "per year" by preventing just one unwanted pregnancy in my lifetime (over half of US pregnancies are unplanned) by giving to a women's reproductive rights organization (you pick how many trees a year you want to believe are used by an American or whoever for all purposes, not just paper).

I can save about 10,000 trees a year by giving an annual $500 donation to a conservation organization that could use that money to preserve roughly 20 acres of rainforest.

The deforestation occurring in the tropical rain forests is mainly due to population pressure. In the world's under-developed nations, more than 90 percent of the deforestation occurs because of the demand for increased agricultural land and/or firewood. Over half of the wood harvested in the world is used for fuel, mostly for cooking and domestic heating. Very little wood for paper pulp comes from rainforests. When you recycle your paper, you are using fewer trees from a tree farm, not preserving an intact ecosystem in a rainforest somewhere.

  If more people realized the importance of eating low on the food chain (stopping eating animals), then eating out would be a lot nicer for us vegetarians.  In the city where I work there are exactly zero vegetarian restaurants.  The hardest thing about being vegetarian is that there are so few of us.

  As a vegetarian, compared to my previous diet, I save about 400,000 gallons of water & an acre of trees per year.  Wouldn't it be nice if everyone did that?