I love the theoretical. I am just bent that way. The purity and elegance in theoretical and ideological thought call to me like a siren compelling me to keep thirty years of Scientific American neatly catalogued in my basement. String Theory, Black Holes, Holography, Fractal Geometry. . . all fill my field of interest, which appears to many as a disregard for the common and the practical. I am a dreamer. I admit it - a-shoot-the-moon sort of character, according to my wife.

Thus, it has been my good fortune to have married my complement - Practical Patty. Patty is everything that I am not. She is down to earth, frugal, compassionate, reverent, sincere, earnest and humble. She is an animal lover, a planner and a saver of money. Patty and I share our lives in a small one-story "Western Bungalow" on a mostly quiet street in Broad Ripple. Even though we may be different in many ways, we share many convictions about living well and responsibly.

A shared discomfort with waste has modified our household routine to include composting and recycling, two activities which have cut our landfill contribution by half. I am constantly reminded to turn off lights because "we do not own the Power and Light Company." The windows of our home are open as many days and nights as possible; reliance on conditioned air is held to a minimum. We have invested in a Sears chipper which allows us to recycle leaves and lawn debris into mulch. We appreciate the diversity of plant life in our small natural lawn that never sees chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides and which I cut with a push reel mower. We enjoy preparing meals ourselves from naturally grown, locally produced products. We garden, preserve and can the old fashioned way. We ride bicycles rather than drive whenever possible. We elect to hang our clothes to dry in the sun rather than to use the dryer. Patty takes joy in feeding the birds, "God's creatures" she calls them, as we look for opportunities to connect with nature that exists even in our urban environment.

In looking to the future, Patty and I are formulating plans to make our bungalow much more energy efficient - for we realize that the age of cheap energy in America (and the world) is over. We are researching environmentally friendly ways to improve the effectiveness of the wall insulation. We will invest in refurbishing the windows. An improved exterior wall system will make it feasible to replace our gas fired furnace with a water furnace, which is a geo exchange system that uses no fossil fuels and can potentially reduce heating costs by 40 percent. We are investigating fitting rain barrels to our gutter system to harvest rainwater for use in lawn irrigation and toilet waste flushing in order to reduce our water use because we know that water also will inevitably become more precious.

This life mode did not arise from a plan executed all at once. Rather, it came to be through making one small choice at a time as the opportunity presented itself. While Green may be a big idea, it is implemented through small acts. Green is not rocket science. It is imminently practical. It is a series of small acts of everyday life based on a mindset that respects that the Earth is precious and finite, and that the Earth belongs to all of life - we humans and the other 30 million or so life forms that depend on it. While we may not be the owners of the Earth, Patty and I are sure that we humans are most definitely its stewards.