This is my first submission to an APLS Carnival and I am thrilled to have finished writing in the nick of time. A huge thanks to The Conscious Shopper for hosting this edition!

My mother comes from a family of Type-A skeptics: hard workers who don’t trust much done by anyone, but themselves! Thankfully, this trait resulted in the early adoption of an anti-plastic and anti-prepared food manifesto in both my childhood home and my current household. My grandparents were also old style free range cattle ranchers who took to the artificial insemination of cattle, but not so much to the use of things like growth hormones. My grandfather grew big healthy cattle, but he did it through the science of selective breading and rich healthy Yampa Valley grass.

My father literally grew up on a Shell Oil Refinery. His father was a head chemist and back in the day (this is pre-1950) they actually housed some employees on refinery land. My dad and my aunt recount various allergies from their childhood, including instances of burning eyes and lungs. It is a wonder that they have both lived into their 70s! My dad spent the next 20 years of his life in New York working a high stress job as an artist for an add agency (think Mad Men) and living across the river in New Jersey.

In the late 1960s my paternal Grandparents retired to Colorado where my grandfather had gone to University as a young man. My father soon followed suit and in the 70s my parents met and soon after got married. My father had recently purchased a plot of land in the Rocky Mountains and thus began my story. He has spent the last 30 years letting go of his big city ways and is probably today more akin to a Zen Cowboy than an Add-man!

As a kid my parents grew a huge lush garden. We kept chickens for eggs and a few other animals as pets (ducks, a rescued rabbit, a few horses, and for a short time a goat). My mom made her own yogurt and cooked all her food from scratch. Each fall we got a side of beef from my grandparents.

One of my friends mothers was a professor of folk lore and also an expert in wild plants. She taught me to identify edible plants and one of my favorite activities as a child was pretending to live in a Tee-pee (built by me) in the middle of the forest and living off the land. I wasn’t much versed in nutrition as my diet consisted of wild berries, chickweed and dandelion greens. Nevertheless, by the age of 10 I’d learned an increasingly rare lesson: humans once had to and indeed could, live off the land without access to a grocery store, the internet or even a catalog.

I went to school in Boulder, CO and so pretty much the rest of my friends parents were hippies. A lot of living off the land, weaving, knitting, and eating healthy and or vegetarian! Boulder is after all the home of Celestial Seasonings, White Wave Tofu (eventually morphed into Silk) and Horizon Organic (now owned by Dean Foods), as well as, a variety of other natural foods purveyors and natural foods grocers.

Most importantly of all though, might be the creation in the late 1970s of two groups that have been hugely influential in Boulder and the greening of my own life. The first is the CU Environmental Center. The second is Ecocycle. Between these two groups, schools and residents of Boulder have been recycling and reducing waste for over 30 years.

School Buses in our area have been driving on bio-diesel for a good 15 years, and for the last few years there has even been citywide composting. The City of Boulder was also one of the first to establish a blue line (to protect the border between the city and the mountains), growth restrictions and collecting open space. I grew up thinking all of this was perfectly average and was quite shocked to learn that Boulder is in fact 20 square miles “surrounded by reality.”

My first memory of recycling is from third grade. The school I attended had been built in the late 1800s and sported exceptionally high ceilings in the stairwells. Our school with the help of Ecocycle took advantage of this two story space and created a giant tree outline on a piece of paper (similar to those graphs of giving at United Way) and we spent the year recycling every bit of paper that we could. For each ton we recycled the tree would be filled in with green until we reached the top. I don’t remember the precise numbers involved, but the visual display of paper usage and the impact of recycling on saving trees had a huge influence on my young and developing world view.

A few years later I had a 7th grade teacher who lived in a rustic cabin with her husband. They had a composting toilet and lived “off the grid.” Mind you this was 1989 and not 2009! Ms. Fee was our Earth Science teacher and every lesson she taught brought me a greater understanding of resources and how the earth worked. I seriously would not have been surprised if Ms. Fee had been the guiding light behind The Story of Stuff.

The next year I became a vegetarian (much to the confusion of my cattle ranching relatives), but it was an ethical decision I chose to make at the time, because I knew that any meat that I ate outside of beef from the Grandparents most likely contributed to environmental degradation. Furthermore I literally could not stomach the idea of animals living in inhumane and unsanitary conditions.

I was a vegetarian for about 12 years and today I do eat some meat, but our family continues to get naturally raised free range beef (we can drive by and wave at them in the summer) or we try to by from companies that receive a stamp of approval from Certified Humane. Our biggest challenge is cutting down meat and dairy consumption to just a few times per week total. We often go for several days at time eating vegetarian, but my husband uses milk on his cereal and we do usually eat meat on average three times per week. We are also addicted to bacon, and so my mom sometimes calls us Begans for “Bacon eating Vegan.”  Perhaps we should really be called “Bagans” a play off of Began and Pagan. (What? No drum roll?) But seriously, a never-ending goal of mine is to prepare more beans and lentils and eat less bacon.

Shortly after I made the decision to become a vegetarian, I also pledged to never own a car.  Rather than your average teen begging mom and dad for the car keys, I was a mountain bike dynamo. Between the age of 12 and 22 I probably put 25,000 miles on my trusty steel framed mountain bike (yes! it was a heavy bugger).  During this time I went through multiple pairs of breaks, tires, a few bike seats and one set of handle bars, but the only gas I burned was my own. I was so committed that I even rode in the winter and with a broken arm in a cast!

Eventually, I did end up getting my license in college, simply because I felt it to be a handicap and or safety hazard to be an adult, but not know how to drive. However, I did not own or buy my own car until 2004 at the age of 27.  I’d succeeded at borrowing friends and co-workers cars, and continuing to commute on a daily basis by bus and or bike, but it was getting tough. And so, I bought a Toyota Corolla, which has indeed been a champion “commuter car” for both my husband and for me. Although, since our move last summer it mostly sits idle in the driveway as my husband now bikes to work!

My early 20s were pretty much spent living a low-impact life. For two years after college I lived in a vegetarian co-op. We bought our groceries through a natural foods co-op and in the summer months took a large CSA share. We composted, gardened, brewed bio-diesel on the front porch and beer in the bathtub.  I taught environmental educations classes to elementary students and led an outdoor camp for inner city kids. It was great fun, but I felt disconnected from reality.

I began to feel like I was swimming upstream, making sacrifices left and right to live a greener life, while millions of other people zipped around in gas guzzling SUVs eating Big Macs and destroying our planet. Needless to say I was bitter. And so, I moved out of the co-op and began to live a life of sin.

I bought some main stream beauty products. Got a job in the “big city,” started to eat some meat, and even eventually bought a car. I did my best to live the life of the average American, but it all came to a screeching halt the day my General Manager called me a tree hugger, in an affectionate, but knowing manner. I was stunned. I asked him how he could tell? He started to list off things, the whole wheat bread, the sprouts, the chai, the organic yogurt, the water bottle, the incessant recycling, biking/busing to work in a suit and so on.

My stunt was up and I was back to being an officially “outed” tree hugger. No one seemed to be surprised, which to me was quite surprising. Back in my days of the co-op I’d thought that living green was somewhat shunned and looked down upon and perhaps it had been. However, by 2005 it was apparently an upward trend and oddly respected by my peers. Over time I began to learn about the little things my “regular” co-workers did to help the planet, from eating vegetarian, to recycling, to conserving water. And, for the first time I began to comfortably live by example.

The story of how I became a card carrying tree hugger does not however stop in 2005. Rather it ramps up in 2006 the year I became pregnant with our son. This is the year that I first learned of BPA and began to meticulously read ingredients, research origins of manufacture, consider the entire life cycle of products and basically become outraged by the state of manufacturing and big business in our world. By the time my son was 6 months old I could no longer contain myself and I had to start sharing discoveries with the world.

And so, in January of 2008 I started this blog to chronicle the activities of our family as we attempted to live a greener existence, while also discussing various issues about which I am particularly passionate. Over this time there have been many many blogs started with a similar purpose and I am honored to be in such good company. Now I am not only a public tree hugger, but thanks to folks, such as the bloggers in the APLS Carnival, I am an optimistic tree hugger. With all the amazing voices and all of the wonderful actions being taken around the world, for the first time in my life I really truly have more hope than ever for a greener and healthier planet.

And so, ends my first submission to the APLS carnival and my second post in two months. Ha! You can read my most recent post here and my very first post here. Thanks for visiting and happy Tree Hugging!