Sometimes I think that you and I were separated at birth somehow.....I have been pondering the exact same thing recently.  I see mother earth being depleted of her natural resources, I see mankind poisoning purselves in the name of 'convienience'.  I've stopped using modern store bought cleaning products in favor of more traditional and 'greener' things, and when I do use modern stuff, I use less of it.  I made myself a promise that when the weather warms up and my back will allow it, I'm going to ride my bike to and from work and the store...basically, if it's a distance of less than 3 or 4 miles and I don't need to haul tons of grocery bags home, I'm using my bike.  I've started cutting plastic grocery bags into strips and knitting them into  bigger, more durable bags (I have the pattern if you'd like it), and I try to buy organic fruit, veggies and now dairy products as well.  I'm also having a 'green' burial, as you may have read about.

I want the earth to be able to sustain my children into their old age...and I think that if we start treating her right now, she might just be able to do just that.

You could start a business with that!  I have a load of bags that I don't know what to do with (I use them in my small trash cans, but I usually just empty that into the one bag that we put out each week)  Luckily, I'm not gathering many anymore.  I switched to taking my own cloth bags to bring home my groceries.  The stores that I go to now give me back $.10 per bag that I don't use of theirs.  It's not much per week, but it will eventually pay for the bags and I don't have bags left over that I don't know what to do with.

I have a hard time looking at my daughter and trying to imagine what her world will be like when she is my age.  I hope that it isn't anything like what I can imagine.  It makes me want to figure out how to buy a hundred acres or so in the UP (the upper peninsula of Michigan) as a reserve for myself.  I also worry about what all the chemicals that she is around all the time could be doing to her long term....well, I worry what they will be doing to me, too.

I refuse to use antibacterial cleaner.  I buy soap that does not have it in there, or use good old water and vinegar to clean with (vinegar is great as a bleach alternative while doing laundry).  I finally found some vegetable based carpet cleaner.  I want to get sealant to seal our OSB floor when we get new carpet (which will be soon) and seal it then put natural fiber, untreated carpet over it. 

I have also been pondering solar panels for our house.  We currently have water heat that uses propane.  To heat our house to 68 degrees during the winter (well, 66 when we're not there) we currently spend $1750 a year in propane.  That is 1252 gallons of propane a year. (Ack)  With solar panels, we could use them to heat water to circulate in our house to heat it during the day and for hot water for bathing and stuff.  Then I am looking into an external log burner to heat it for the night.  That way we would just be using propane for cooking.  Unfortunately, solar panels and the log burner are expensive.  And, I'm not quite sure why our government doesn't give us a tax break or something if we start using better energy resources (well, if I lived in Cali they would, but that's because they don't have enough power to power all the homes).

Sometimes the world seems so off course to me that I'm not sure how we will ever get it back on track.

If I were a corporation, there would be.  Michigan is not a very "green" state.  Just a few weeks ago they finally got together and started to get the big power suppliers to agree on how to handle surplus power (power that is generated from your solar panels that you don't use and sell back to the power company).  Northern Michigan is much better about solar power and wind electricity than the southern areas (where I am) so it's even hard finding a place to purchase from around here.

It's a bit sad, don't you think?  However, if I were in Cali, I could get an $8,000 credit to install a "typical" solar panel setup (which costs about double that).  Why don't all states do that?

I never understood why we didn't spend more time researching ways to use solar power.  It's just there waiting to be used, yet we rely on fossil fuels instead.

I am 100% with you when it comes to green living. I am designing a greywater filter for our home to 1) reduce our water consumption, 2) reduce our sewage output and the resultant burden on the treatment plant. We're also putting gutters on our house and adding rainbarrels, and we walk the highways collecting aluminum cans when we are able.

Our five year goal is to produce all of our consumables (or the income to purchase new consumables, such as canning jars, etc) ourselves, both at our current house and on lots across the street we're trying to purchase. Our longterm goal is complete self sufficiency.

(PS: I linked to the article through mine. Thanks for the link).

I've pondered solar panels, but at the moment it isn't very cost efficient. Where we're at, we may be able to produce some of our electricity off of a small wind turbine. I also can give you a very simple to make solar water heater (actually more of a preheater, but it does reduce the operating cost of the main heater), if you have room at the south side of your house and you're far enough out to not have to worry about stupid zoning laws.

We're also working at putting up a greenhouse, which I am probably most excited about. We're going to "winter over" our chickens below the benches, as suggested in a book we're reading on portable chicken coops (Chicken Tractor, by Andy Lee and Patricia Foreman) to use the chickens' body heat to help in heating the greenhouse.

I consider the most essential first step in "going green" to be a subscription to Mother Earth News. You can learn a lot from people who have been doing it for many years (and they have a GREAT online subscription rate and automatic billing so you can save the cost of paper transactions with them)

I've actually learned a lot from my Grandma.  She's been recycling before they had a term for it.  Old jars in any form were used for canning.  She composts food scraps for fertilizer for her garden (there's actually a real science to that), and she can reuse just about anything that she comes in contact with.

I plan to build a compost container this year to start putting scraps in for my garden.  I want to grow a bunch of organic veggies and can what we can't eat.  I wish that I lived far enough out that zoning wouldn't bother me, but unfortunately that's not the case, so I have to be careful how I build things.

My Mom just built a nice greenhouse out of old sliding glass doors and used windows.  She just had to buy the framing lumber and the roofing material (it's that semi-transparent thick plastic).  Even in the winter without heat, it stays pretty warm from the solar heat.  I'm sure having chickens in a greenhouse would keep it nice and warm.  Unfortunately, I can't raise Chickens.  I had a bad chicken experience as a child (which is also a reason that I can't eat Chicken) but that is a whole different story