I recently signed our family up for an "Eco-Friendly Family Challenge" at work. I was asked to be a contributor to a blog for the challenge. Since I have taken the time to write it there, I figured I would post it here as well.

Here is my first entry. It is supposed to tell why we signed up. Let me know what you think.

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A little over a year ago, my wife, Kim, and I decided to take steps towards being more environmentally conscious, or "eco-friendly". A few of the major motivating factors in our move were: us becoming home owners, us expecting our first child, and, surprisingly, our faith.

Kim and I bought our first house in August of 2006. Soon after moving in, we flet the weight of responsibility settling in. With home ownership came not only a mortgage payment, but also a bigger impact on the world around us. We had to make decisions about what type of appliances to buy, what temperature to set the thermostat at, what type of chemicals to use on the lawn, etc..

These were questions we had never considered before. Previously, we did our part by walking our cans and bottles across the parking lot of the apartment complex to the recycling center. Now, we were home owners. That makes us grown-ups, right? And being grown-ups means being responsible, right? So, for better or worse, we decided to try our best to be responsible and make these decisions with the environment in mind.

Not long after moving in to our house, Kim and I found out that we were expecting our first child. This added another layer of responsibility and another reason to live environmentally conscious lives. In general, it is not our generation that has to deal with the environmental decisions that we make. Most of the impact of our decisions is felt by future generations.

So, given that we were now making a contribution to those future generations. We felt that we should also take part in the clean-up and maintaining of the environment. We hope that the habitats we teach our son, Palmer, will be something that he can teach his children. It's great to think that we could possibly be setting our family on a course that helps preserve our environment.

The most surprising reason for us going green may be our faith. It was for us. Around the time we started making an effort to be more eco-friendly, I read a book about a guy that was off the deep end when it comes to being environmentally conscious. He had altered his life completely in an attempt to reduce his impact on the environment. I wasn't ready to do that, but I did find some of his ideas relatively easy to implement.

The most interesting thing about this guy was his motivation for living "eco-friendly". His faith was the driving force behind his actions. This was interesting because he and I shared a common faith, yet, I had never thought about my faith being connected to my environmental decisions. As I said before, I wasn't quite ready to go as far as this guy, but the idea that my faith was somehow connected the environment definitely weighed in on my family's move toward being "eco-friendly".

I decided to sign our family up for the RFC Eco-Friendly Family Challenge for a few reasons. We hope to find more practical ways that we can reduce our negative impact on the environment. We also saw it as a chance to share some of the things we have found easy to implement. We'd love to see other families join in with us in our attempt to take responsibility for our actions. We thought sharing some of the things we do as a family might make that task seem a little less daunting.

We are not radicals. We are one family taking small, simple steps toward being "eco-friendly".