On the spectrum of carbon footprints, I would categorize my family as somewhere in the middle. Though we have many environmentally friendly habits, there are definitely categories that we could change our behavior in. We compost all our scrap food and make a conscious effort to eat locally and organically. My Mom recently purchased an electric hybrid which contributes significantly in reducing our carbon footprint and my Dad is hoping to purchase a fully electric car in the near future. We heat our home with wood that is hand chopped on our property, although we keep our home in the high 70s to 80s in the winter months. We also practice small sustainable habits such as using reusable bags, donating our old clothes to places such as goodwill, and buying clothes of high quality. Though we are aware of our carbon footprint and make efforts to reduce it, we also frequently travel. In the past year, we’ve visited Florida, Montreal (twice), Saratoga, NYC, Boston, Rhode Island, Morocco, and Virginia. We also travel quite frequently on the weekends and midweek for sports as I participate in Soccer, Nordic Skiing, and Track and my younger brothers also play multiple sports. These habits play a significant role in raising our carbon footprint which is something I would like to work on improving.

Excellent points Siena! In my family we work very hard to reduce pour carbon footprint as much as possible but in the past few years we have struggled with that. I participated in a baseball team that required an intense amount of travel each weekend for about 5 months. Selfishly I always liked taking my moms vehicle which didn’t get nearly as good gas mileage as my dads hybrid does. My moms car tends to average 37 MPG while my dads averages a whopping 72. By deciding to take my moms car every weekend instead of my dads it seriously affected the amount of green house gasses I put into the atmosphere which I now regret. I also participate in a travel soccer league that like baseball requires me to sometimes travel multiple hours each weekend. When I have to do this traveling I plan on now mainly sing my dads vehicle as much as possible considering how environmentally friendly it is. Although I now wish I used my dads vehicle more in many other ways our family does a great job reducing our carbon footprint. In the winter we keep our house at a chilly 68 degrees and we try to use a very little amount of heat. In the the warmer months we only have on air conditioning for a few hours in the day and try to keep the house at 73 degrees. As a family that is juggling many other things we try our very best to reduce our carbon footprint and will continue to for many years to come.

I live in the Pacific so that we depend a lot on flights. I try to pay attention to other topic. Me and my family are trying to reduce our meat consumption and even to stop it. Instead of throwing clothes away we give them to families who need them in islands. We try to reduce our impact on the environment like before we used dryers and now we totally stop it. We plant and try consume local foods.