Too much green?

I've always been the type of person to try and do good for the environment. I remember what school taught me and by watching Captain Planet. A couple years ago, I really started to try to be green...not super green, but make more of an effort. After Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth, you started to see more and more of an awareness. More books, more blogs, more people talking. It was wonderful! I learned a lot!

When we moved to New York, our shower had a small leak that due to laziness and lack of time, the leak turned into a steady stream. I was disgusted with myself, I claimed to be a person who tried to live green and earth friendly while my bathroom was wasting not only tons of water but gas too because it was coming from the hot tap. My passion for being green took a huge fall, and I just did the easy normal things. How could I claim to be a green person, when I was wasting so much water. I felt like a hypocrite. So, I just laid low.

Yet, all the while I saw the media just boom with "We have to be green and save the planet!!" I was excited! Finally, people are getting the message. But then it just started to grow more and more...and more. And with my shower haunting me causing me to step back and watch everything rather than take action I felt that, while it's awesome that the media is pushing and getting the message out, it's getting too much. With last week's NBC's green week, and every show had some small "this is how you can help" story I felt that it had become a fad. It's the cool thing to do now! Let's all help the planet! I'm a big company and see, I'm being environmentally friendly! But how much of that is truth? Are these big companies really making an effort to change? Or is it all surface and show, while in the background they too have a leaky shower?

We finally got the shower fixed and as sad to say, I'm excited again to get back on track of my green life. But now, I'm just overwhelmed by all the content that's out there now. In barely 6 months it's exploded!

I'm curious to see in a few years how passionate everyone is about all this. Will things truly get better? Or will the hype die down leaving the few dedicated alone again? It's happened before, the rainforest of the 90's, the saving water and electricity of the 80's. Now, being green of the 2000s.

I won't back down again. Even if I have a 1000 leaky showers to fix. I will do my best! I won't be perfect, but I'll be in it for the long haul. I won't be part of the fad.