With the convergence of Earth Day, Election Day, Arbor Day (one shopping day left for the perfect gift for your favorite tree), a sudden eruption of spring blooms and the pope all in the same week, you'd have to be a lump of coal not to consider your lifestyle and its consequences for the planet.

That's unless you've been too busy shopping for a dummy to strap beside you in your SUV so you can use the HOV lane while eating a fast-food burrito out of a box you then throw out the window at a baby rabbit.

I don't need to care what sort of world we pass on to our children -- I don't have any, and I'm not terribly concerned about yours -- but I do anyway. Not enough to go to extremes of effort or expense, but if I can give a beer bottle or hummus tub a second life by putting it in an orange bin rather than a trash bag, you can count on me.

I'm not a true scuppie -- a Socially Conscious Upwardly Mobile Person -- because newspaper people are not so much upwardly mobile as backwardly noble. I can't afford to blow the rent money at Whole Foods on organic cruelty-free hand-churned onion dip or imported free-trade hemp dental floss.

But I do use public transit when I have a few hours to kill, and I try not to throw anything away if I can put it in a box in the basement and then move.

Green is in, and businesses, organizations, politicians and even, bizarrely, oil companies are constantly bombarding us with claims of ecological saintliness and exhortations to stop being such a reckless polluter and for God's sake go buy something made of bamboo.

Even practitioners of yoga, which hardly ranks up there with NASCAR in terms of environmental hedonism, are urged to reuse worn-out yoga mats. I found a wealth of uses for old mats online, including smothering garden weeds, cutting them into baseball bases and making hats and masks for children.

You could cut them into place mats if you don't mind your food smelling like feet.

Speaking of feet, I wondered about my own carbon footprint, and whether it would be better in Birkenstocks.

So I found a carbon-footprint quiz on Wired.com to see whether I'm living an acceptable life or should be cast into a composting toilet.

You start with 500 pounds of CO2 against you just for the trash you generate.

(Measuring a gas in pounds may sound strange. But don't you exhale fully before stepping onto a scale? I also blow my nose and pluck my eyebrows.)

Then comes your home; an apartment in a multiunit building generates only 8,000 pounds a year, whereas a single-family detached home is 15,500 pounds. My apartment in a small building with fewer than five units is good -- or bad -- for 13,400 pounds. But there's a discount for heating with natural gas rather than electricity, which brings it down to 5,360. I'd prefer a discount on my gas bill.

Next, the car. Averaging about 30 miles to the gallon and nearly 12,000 miles a year, I'm toward the low end of the wickedness scale, racking up 8,004 pounds of CO2. A car getting 35 mpg and driven only 9,000 miles a year would cost a little over 5,000 pounds, while a guzzler getting 10 mpg and driven 15,000 miles a year -- back and forth to work from a home 21 miles away in a Hummer or Rolls Royce Phantom, for example -- spews a whopping 30,000 pounds.

Then you add your transportation by other means, ranging from interstate bus at 0.2 pounds per mile to city bus at 0.7 pounds per mile. This is where taking all those road trips in a car rather than embracing the romance and social adventure of going Greyhound really comes back to bite you. But my habit of commuting on the T helps; about 1,440 miles by rail rather than roadster contribute just 864 pounds.

Yes, even by rail, going to work is doing more damage to the environment than all my used tissues and plastic forks.

Wanderlust is damning: Vacations involving air travel wallop me with over 10,000 pounds. Burgers on the grill incur a penalty of 771 pounds of cow flatulence. And casual recycling forgives only 50 pounds. Even fanatical recycling erases only 250 pounds. You can't compete with the cows.

According to the scoring, one person, just little me, must answer for nearly 26,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, putting me in the middle ground between green saints who refuse to belch and reprobates who are emptying hair-spray cans directly onto the ozone layer.

I could do better. Most of us could. All it takes is a carbon footprint on our backsides.