By Sanjayan

The e-mail left little to the imagination.

It was a rebuke — straightforward and simple — for something I had done on national television. “You should have known better,” it read.

Here was my crime: While appearing on a television show to promote a message of sustainability, I had sipped coffee not from a reusable ceramic or metal alloy mug, but from a disposable, chain-brand paper cup.

I should have known better.

But knowing better can be awfully difficult. The complexity of manufacturing processes, transportation and globalization makes environmental costing and evaluation of trade-offs about as murky as a green pond — even for us scientists.

Transportation Isn’t the Only Factor to Account For

Take what we consume, for example.

Scientists now believe that what you eat and how you prepare the food makes a bigger difference — in terms of resource use and climate change impacts — than transportation:

• Keep the lid off when boiling something and all your good karma of buying locally goes up in steam.
   
• Fruits grown in foreign countries may be produced with less energy than those grown locally in heated greenhouses with heavy fertilizers.
   
• And who knew that French wine shipped to the East Coast has a lower carbon footprint than California wine trucked across the country?

And then there’s personal transportation…

After a five-year hiatus from owning an automobile, I finally had to buy one. A hybrid getting 50 miles to the gallon was an easy choice.

But had I already owned a car, truck or gas-guzzling SUV, the extra fuel load of my old clunker would still have been preferable to the metal, rubber, plastic, glass, fabric and paint that goes into producing a 2,800-pound hybrid Toyota Prius.

An existing car’s green penance during birth was long-ago paid for, while a brand new one — even a green one — pays today.

Consider Old vs. New

All goods — even clean, green, eco-happy ones — are environmentally costly to produce, market and sell. Sure they save energy in their future use, but making them de novo has tremendous costs in natural resources.

For instance, while lifestyle magazines encourage us to replace older, heavy-flush toilets with low-flow models, none talk about the cost of the embodied energy necessary to produce a new ceramic bowl. And what sort of damage might I instigate when I rip out my toilet, junk it and put in a new one?

Though I can opt to buy electricity from low-emission sources such as a wind farm, the massive amounts of steel that go into producing a modern wind turbine — not to mention the thousands of square kilometers of land needed to site turbines in number — are entirely opaque to me and most other consumers.

Is building a wind turbine better than building a coal-fired plant to meet new energy needs? No doubt. But better still? Not to build anything in the first place.

Quantifying the Environmental Cost

Quantifying this green equivalent of the original sin has prompted supermarket giant Tesco (a U.K. company) to attempt to label each of its 70,000 food lines with a carbon footprint number — akin to the calorie information you see on food stuff.

Marks & Spencer (another British retailer) and Wal-Mart have embarked on similar ideas. It’s a noble quest. But already the complications of life-cycle analysis for items that have multiple ingredients made and shipped from all over the world have bedeviled these corporations.

Just look at the ingredient labels on most things we consume and you’ll get the picture. But doing nothing is unacceptable to me, as it is to a growing number of people worldwide. Instead, we need to learn new habits, such as:

• Making do with the old until it absolutely needs replacing — then going for a high-efficiency model.
   
• Building green only when you have to build.
   
• Eating lower on the food chain, driving less, eating less, boiling less.

As it turns out, less is always better, because more stuff rather than less-efficient stuff is the real culprit.

Don’t Make the Same Mistake I Did

The chemist Martin Hocking once wrote an academic article on environmental costing. He compared five different types of coffee cups and found that a disposable paper cup was the clear winner — a ceramic mug has to be used for three years almost daily to reach equivalence. Which isn’t surprising, once you account for the 3,000-degree C fire used in ceramics.

But that’s beside the point.

On national television, I looked like I was not even trying — and that’s what I think the angry e-mail was really about.

Next time, when on TV, I will only sip from a reusable mug and I will use a dishwasher to clean it afterwards, which uses far less energy and water than hand-washing.

If it's an energy-efficient dishwasher, that is.

I can see the e-mails already.  

The opinions expressed in "Wild Life" are the author's. They should not be construed as the position of The Nature Conservancy.

Read Other "Wild Life" Columns:

• June 2008:
  An Egg is an Egg
  
• April 2008:
  When Polar Bears Attack
• March 2008:
  The Ghost Bird
• February 2008:
  Worth a Thousand Words
• January 2008:
  The Jaguar and the Tiger
• December 2007:
  I'm the Diversity
• November 2007:
  Should We Save the Last Intact Places?
• October 2007:
  The Encounter
• September 2007:
  Climate Change and the Arctic
• July 2007:
  Mr. President and his Monkeys
• June 2007:
  The Perpetual War for Nature
• May 2007:
  A Road Called Optimism
• April 2007:
  The AIDS Drain on Conservation
• March 2007:
  Blood and Diamonds
• February 2007:
  To Shoot a Lion

Nature picture credits (left to right): Photos © iStockphoto.com (garage sale); © Erika Nortemann/TNC (Sanjayan)