Toronto Star: Nancy J. White

We know what we’re supposed to do to save the Earth. Trouble is, we’re only human.

Lorisa Merlin is good. She scrubs with water and vinegar instead of toxic cleansers, teaches her children to turn off lights, commutes on the GO train and shops with her husband at the farmers’ market.

But Merlin, who once spent a summer as a tree planter up north, has her environmental fault line: diapers.

“I just can’t do cloth. I don’t have enough time,” confesses Merlin, who works 9-to-5 in human resources and comes home to 20-month-old twins and a 4-year-old. “As it is, I do 10 loads of laundry a week. Oh, that’s another one. Water consumption.

“All those disposable diapers probably outweigh the benefits of my 48,000 trees. Now I’m back to zero.”

Guilt. Green guilt. It’s out there and it’s growing. Just stand in a grocery checkout line, everyone earnestly holding cloth bags as you grab fistfulls of plastic. “I’d feel excuses wanting to bubble out of my mouth,” Sarah Winterton says with a laugh. She now remembers to bring her cloth ones. Mostly.

Even David Suzuki feels guilty. His fossil-fuel burning air miles nag at his environmentally evolved conscience. The green guru is now taking more trains and doing video conferences when possible, he explains in an email.

It’s hard not to feel moral pangs now that you can quantify your eco-failings. Websites help calculate your carbon footprint, the tonnage of nasty emissions your indulgent lifestyle produces. The average Torontonian: 8.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to zerofootprint.com. The average Canadian, 10.1 tonnes.

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