My footprint is shrinking. I replaced more incandescent light bulbs in the house and outside with 14 watt (lumens 60 watt), and 19 watt (lumens 75 watt) flourescent bulbs. Each has a life of 10,000 hours. I will be saving $40 per bulb over its life. Doing the math I have saved $620 in electric bills over probably the next three years as they last that long or more depending on how much I use the lamps they are in. Together with riding the bus one day a week, carpooling on day and staying home to work another, I have reduced my foot print to 12 hectares (1200 acres). It was 19 three weeks ago. According the the Global Food Print Network, www.footprintnetwork.org, the average for Americans is 24 hectares or 2400 acres of resources to support an individual's life style.

**There is a small amount of mercury in the Compact Flourescent (CF) bulbs so they need to be recycled properly. Don't break the bulb; return it to the store you bought them from or to the recycling center in your town. But, flourescents add less mercury to the environment overall. Note that coal power plants are the single largest source of mercury emissions into the environment . According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), (when coal power is used) the mercury released from powering an incandescent bulb for five years exceeds the sum of the mercury released by powering a comparably luminous CFL for the same period and the mercury contained in the lamp.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, if every household in the U.S. replaced three 60 watt incandescent bulbs with three14 watt compact flourescent bulbs we could keep a comparable amount of hydrocarbons out of the air as if we removed 3.5 million cars from the highways of America!

In September 2006, Wal-Mart started a campaign to endorse CFLs. They aim to sell one CFL to every one of their 100 million customers within the next year and thus change the energy consumption of the United States and to improve their reputation. In Ottawa, Canada there is an effort to get every household to change at least one lightbulb. Project Porchlight has volunteers going door-to-door providing one CF bulb to every household for free.

Now the bad news: I did not ride the bus last week. I coped out due to scheduling problems I told myself, but it was really Priscilla. She did not want to bother with it preferring to ride in her own car. So the behavior still persists to have it my way and cop out on my duty to everyone else to try to reduce my impact more.

Stay tuned for the report on how well that Better Me can bring Priscilla around. I consider this a struggle for our lives, not a petty matter.

For everykind of compact flourescent bulb you will need go to http://www.1000bulbs.com/index.php Go to "Screw-In Flourescents"