Is your attitude toward green living more defeatist than determined? If so, no wonder. Most of us are guilty of walking the Earth with a heavy tread, and it is easy to assume that small changes won’t save the planet. The good news? Living greener is easier than you think, and doesn’t require swapping the car keys for a bus pass.

“The big misconception about green living is it means great sacrifices, but it’s not a mandate for depriving ourselves of modern conveniences,” says Crissy Trask, an environmental consultant in Spokane, Wash., and author of It’s Easy Being Green: A handbook for Earth-friendly living (Gibbs Smith, April 2006).

What’s clear is we have work to do. According to the Global Footprint Network, an international organization that promotes the idea of the ecological footprint — a tool that calculates human demand on Nature and Nature’s capacity to meet it — we are using far more resources than Nature can produce. A person’s footprint is the amount of productive land required to produce all the resources he or she consumes and to absorb all the waste he or she generates.

By calculating a country’s environmental footprint, industrialized nations emerge as major culprits behind this environmentally taxing trend. According to Global Footprint estimates, every Canadian will burn through the equivalent of 7.5 hectares in a lifetime; however, only about 2.2 hectares of usable land exist for each person in the world.

The numbers are daunting, but it’s not too late to curb the damage. “Canada’s ecological footprint is large, but we should be focusing on how simple changes can reduce it,” says Ann Rowan, sustainability program director at the Vancouver-based David Suzuki Foundation.

The energy we use, the purchases we make and the transportation we take all have a huge impact on the depth of our tread. And in case being kinder to the Earth isn’t incentive enough, improving consumption habits also saves cash.

“It makes good economic sense to use energy wisely,” says Barbara Mullally Pauly, senior chief of housing programs at Natural Resources Canada’s Ottawa-based Office of Energy Efficiency. The OEE’s EnerGuide for Houses program drives this message home by offering grants to encourage owners to retrofit their houses to make them more energy-efficient.

As part of the program, an EnerGuide home advisor (find one at www.energuideforhouses.gc.ca) will inspect your house, assign it an EnerGuide rating and create a report outlining areas in which energy is being wasted, along with suggestions for upgrades (such as replacing the furnace or installing low-flow shower heads). You have 18 months to complete the upgrades, at which point the advisor will return, redo the inspection and assign your home a new rating. You’ll then receive a grant based on how much your rating improved.

There are many other simple ways to improve home energy consumption, such as:

> Wash clothes in cold water, and replace your old washer with a front-loading model. Front-loaders extract more water from clothes so they spend less time in the dryer.

> Get rid of the basement beer fridge. Older models can guzzle seven times the electricity refrigerators that are EnergyStar-rated. (The latter are significantly more energy-efficient than minimum government standards.)

> Microwave leftovers instead of heating them on the stovetop. Microwaves use 30%-50% less energy than stoves. And use an electric kettle instead of a stovetop model.

> Plug in home entertainment and office electronics to a power bar, and switch the bar off when not in use. Unplug cellphone and BlackBerry chargers when not in use. Set your computer’s sleep function to kick in after 15 minutes of inactivity.

> Regularly change air conditioner and furnace filters — dirty filters create drag — and have both units inspected annually to ensure they are running properly. Turn off pilot lights in gas furnaces and fireplaces in summer months, and keep central air conditioners connected to a single breaker that can be turned off in the winter.

> Make sure your hot-water heater is the right size for your family. Visit www.oee.nrcan.gc.ca and click on “Residential,” then “Heating equipment and controls” for more details.

What we eat also plays a huge role in our footprints. “The food on our tables has travelled an average of 1,400 kilometres,” says Rowan. She stresses that Canadians should start eating more locally grown foods, which can be as simple as visiting your local farmers’ market or ordering home delivery of organic produce. Reducing meat consumption and choosing free-range beef and poultry instead of meat from factory farms (which produce more manure than can be worked back into the land) can also lessen ecological impact.

@page_break@Aside from energy and food consumption, spending less time in the driver’s seat is one of the most Earth-friendly acts you can perform. Pledging to leave the car in the driveway just one day a week — in favour of carpooling, walking or public transportation — can save hundreds of litres of gas each year. Buying a smaller vehicle in lieu of a hulking SUV also means savings.

“Choose a car that fits your daily needs, and not one that’s useful for the two weeks a year you go camping,” says Rowan. “Then take the money you save on gas, and rent an SUV for your vacation.”

Although hybrid vehicles are gaining popularity (Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd., the first automaker to build hybrid cars in Canada, will start production later this year), many fuel-efficient conventional cars are now on the market. Visit www.oee.nrcan.gc.ca/vehicles for Natural Resources Canada’s vehicle fuel-consumption ratings. IE