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 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 Astyk, 36, a writer and a farmer who is trying, with the aid of a specially designed ...