Almost fully committed

Extreme Approaches Toward Living a Green Life - NYTimes.com

That is one way that Ms. Astyk, a mother of four, expresses her concern for the environment. She has unplugged the family refrigerator, using it as an icebox during warmer months by putting in frozen jugs of water as the coolant (in colder weather, she stores milk and butter outdoors). Her farmhouse in Knox, N.Y., has a homemade composting toilet and gets its heat from a wood stove; the average indoor winter temperature is 52 degrees.

Many people who can comfortably use “carbon footprint,” “global warming” and “energy offset” in a sentence will toss a bottle or can into a blue recycling bin and call it a day. Those who are somewhat more committed may swap incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, rely on cloth shopping bags and turn to mass transit.

Then there are people like Ms. Astyk, 36, a writer and a farmer who is trying, with the aid of a specially designed calculator, to whittle her family’s energy use to 10 percent of the national average. She and her husband, Eric Woods, a college professor, grow virtually all their own produce, raise chickens and turkeys, and spend only $1,000 a year in consumer goods, most of which they buy used. They air-dry their clothes, and their four sons often sleep huddled together to pool body heat.

They began this regimen in 2002. “My husband and I started to talk about climate change, and oil prices were going up,” Ms. Astyk said. “The other factor was a justice issue. There was a great disparity between the resources used by the third world and by us, so we decided we had to cut back.” Some people may view Ms. Astyk and her family as role models, pioneers who will lead us to a cleaner earth.

Others may see them as colorful eccentrics, people with admirable intentions who have arrived at a way of life close to zealotry. To others they come across as “energy anorexics,” obsessing over personal carbon emissions to an unhealthy degree, the way crash dieters watch the bathroom scale.

Ms. Astyk has heard such talk but says her neighbors’ attitudes have softened as energy prices have risen. “People have moved gradually from ‘Sharon is a fruitcake’ to ‘Sharon is a fruitcake who might make some sense,’ ” she said.

Jay Matsueda, who might also answer to the name energy anorexic, or carborexic, has neither heat nor air-conditioning in his condominium in Culver City, Calif.

He runs his car, a 1983 Mercedes SD Turbo, on waste oil from a Los Angeles restaurant. When he gives a gift, it is usually an organic cookbook, a copy of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth” or reusable bamboo flatware. “That way, people don’t have to accept plastic cutlery at takeout places,” said Mr. Matsueda, 35, who wrote in an e-mail message that he occasionally relieves himself on his lawn in order to “save a flush.”
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But nobody recommends reusing the same plastic Ziploc bag for a year, as Anita Lavine and Joe Turcotte, a Seattle couple, have been doing. When their two toddlers come home from preschool, Ms. Lavine scrubs the Ziploc bags that hold their soiled clothes and biodegradable diapers, and uses them the next day. She does the same with the plastic bags that hold her children’s apples “and random lunch stuff,” she said.

Whatever the weather, Mr. Turcotte, who is 40, rides his bicycle 16 miles a day (round trip) to his job at a health care foundation. Ms. Lavine, 35, who works for a company that makes DVD games, keeps the thermostat at 60 and is about to acquire three chickens. They’ll be welcomed for their eggs, their willingness to eat food waste and for their ordure — a nice addition to the family’s compost heap.

“My friends,” Ms. Lavine said, “think I’m the craziest person they know.”