When you eat local, you reduce the environmental impact of your daily bread. (Food on the shelves of your neighborhood grocery has traveled an average of 1,500 miles—that’s a lot of oil in your tomatoes and not the heart-healthy kind.) Summer is a great time to become a “locavore.” Finding fresh vegetables is easy: I can supplement my own garden gleanings with a weekly delivery through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, or visits to several farmer’s markets, which carry a lot more than produce.

The Eat Local Challenge Web site posts regular updates on resources: where to find locally made dairy products, flour, honey, maple syrup, baked goods, and—if I were a carnivore—meat. The icing on the cake? We even have a candy manufacturer in the community, producing great chocolate from Fair Trade, sustainably grown cocoa.

No matter where you live in the U.S., you can find farmer’s markets, CSAs, food coops, even grocery stores and restaurants that make available local food at www.localharvest.com.

I’m waiting for the kettle to whistle. After I steep my tea, the remainder of the boiling water will go on the dandelions in my herb beds. I’ll pour it on their roots and watch as they shrivel up like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Not that I have anything against dandelions. They have free rein-along with the clover, violets, and wild strawberries-on my lawn. (I think they’re pretty, plus, the rabbits love them and stay away from the vegetables.) And they’re a nutritious green to cook in the spring while still tender.

But I want my food-producing areas to grow without competition. So, death to the dandelions.

Many of my neighbors use conventional herbicide sprays and treatments. But the synthetics in these chemicals-many petroleum-based-can kill beneficial organisms in the soil, including the garden’s best friend: worms. They release pollutants into air and water sources-and our bodies. Many require or lead to the use of more water. So even if they turn the lawn into an emerald-velvet carpet, I see nothing green about their results.

A couple of great resources are www.beyondpesticides.org and www.greengardenista.com. They offer other tips for terminating weeds, from drowning them in vinegar to smothering them with plastic.

 If you’re a gardener, this is the time of year you give up on keeping your house clean. It’s a near impossible effort to keep from tracking part of your garden into your house as you traipse back and forth from vegetable bed to kitchen sink to garage to flower borders. I give myself a lot more latitude during garden season-after all, it’s pretty easy to sweep up and clean off the crumbly loam that ends up in my house.

            But it makes me think about all the other crud that could make its way onto my floors: car oil, salt crystals, herbicides, and other pollutants and toxins. That’s why establishing the home as a shoe-free zone can improve indoor air quality and guarantee sweep-and-mop reduction.

Vena, my neighbor who grew up in China, keeps a rubber mat and a basket of slippers just inside her door. Every time she comes inside, off go the shoes and on go the slippers, keeping unwelcome irritants outside, reducing wear and tear on the floor, and sidestepping the need to clean as frequently.

Increasingly, more of us are insisting that we need to observe Earth Day every day. If each of us could take on just one new sustainable practice–whether changing the lightbulbs, turning down (or up) the thermostat, or parking the car and walking–just think of the impact. And if we did this every day? Well, what a giant leap toward lightening our collective footprint!

Check out the Earth Day Web site, www.earthday.net, for events near you-most communities stretch the celebration to the weekend. And use it as a resource year-round. It lists other events as well as actions you can take to be part of the growing wave of Earth guardians.

Over the two years I’ve employed my two rain barrels, converted pickle containers (I still get a whiff of “half-sour” every time I take off the lid), I don’t think I’ve turned on my outdoor hose once during growing season. A good Indiana rainstorm will fill those 66-gallon containers in a flash. I plug on my garden hose and give my flowers and vegetable patch a good drink.

The use of rain barrels earns me quite a few green brownie points from my most water-conscious friends: first, because I’m cutting back my household water consumption in a world where potable water is increasingly at risk; second, because I’m reducing storm water runoff, which picks up oils, pollutants, and other toxic substances that make their way into our water systems, lakes, and rivers.

Rain barrels aren’t hard to find these days. Garden centers and big box stores often carry a variety of sizes. Most cost from $100 and up. But the return is worth the investment-cost-free rainwater, the ultimate in recyclable resources.

In my ongoing search to find ways not to “own” things, I fantasize a neighborhood co-op that shares garden tools, yard equipment, even food-canning kettles and vacuum cleaners. Stored in a communal building, all this stuff is checked out when and for the time period folks need it, and returned in an allotted time.

“Absurd!”A cynical friend observed: “It would never work.”

But this isn’t a new idea. It’s been in practice since Benjamin Franklin introduced the institution of the public library to a young United States.

What a concept! Books and information available to anyone who has a card. Resources that you can take away and return when you’re done with them. A community-supported institution that charges no use fee.

My public library system is online, so I go to the Web site (no driving), request a book, and select the branch where I want to pick it up. If it’s available, I walk on over (yes, it’s that close). If it’s out, they send an email when it’s ready for pick-up.

If more people borrowed instead of bought, we’d consume less paper and reduce resources and energy that goes into creating books. Sure, there will always be books that you want to keep on your shelf-whether favorite classics or reference books you turn to a lot. But does everyone who’s intrigued by Oprah’s latest pick have to own their own copy?

I took a 600-mile (each way) road trip with two young children. I seriously considered the train — honest — but it meant spending more than I would for airline tickets, giving up 40 hours of time to travel, and changing trains twice (once in the middle of the night). Instead, I copped out and burned up two-thirds ton of CO2 emissions, according to carbon offset site www.nativeenergy.com). Even a $14 carbon offset through the site did little to assuage my guilt.

So you can imagine how heartened I am that one of President Obama’s key stimulus commitments is to fund high-speed rail service with $13 billion. Train travel is by far a more energy-efficient mode of transportation than either driving or flying — traveling by rail, we’d have reduced our carbon footprint to less than half of what generated. Check out comparisons in the Native Energy site.

While $13 billion is not enough to fuel the realization of a nationwide high-speed rail, it’s one more drop than we had before-and already it’s sparking dialogue and furthering the re-thinking of transportation as we know it.

The stimulus money may not carry us to the end of our journey to a more sustainable transportation system. But maybe, just maybe, it could be enough to push us past the tipping point and power the little engine that could.

As spring creeps closer, I’m spending more time outside in the garden. I’ve put in the radishes and carrots, beets and Swiss chard, and spinach and lettuce. Soon, it’ll be time to get in the annual herbs, and before you know it, I’ll be planting tomato, pepper, and cucumber seedlings.

But this week, I’m moving my rain barrels outside and into position — at the ends of my gutter downspouts. That way, I’ll capture all that spring rainwater that falls in April and May, and — as I have the past three years — dramatically reduce my water consumption and water bill.

My rain barrels are recycled pickle containers retrofitted to collect and dispense water. But now I’m finding that almost all garden shops sell them. You can even find them on WalMart, Target, and Home Depot Web sites.

I’ve been advised, however, to use the captured rainwater only on flowers, lawn, and nonedible growth: The water may contain chemicals from the asphalt roof and other pollutants that you don’t want to eat along with your salad caprese at the end of summer.

Grocery shopping has become an agony for me — I can spend 15 minutes on yogurt alone. I go for the largest size, so as to cut down on packaging. But that one comes from Greece, so not very energy-wise with all the travel. Then I decide to use organic as my criterion, until I see that they’re in small, single-serve sizes, and still traveled far to get here.

Then I remember that a local award-winning dairy produces an organic yogurt, sold in large, recyclable glass bottles. Perfect! But it’s not carried here — so I’d have to make another, longer fossil-fuel-consuming trip.

By now I’m paralyzed in the dairy section.

Good news: With every trip to the supermarket, we have an opportunity to vote “sustainable” with our dollars. Bad news: So many factors weigh into “sustainable,” it’s hard to know the best choice.

I like the hierarchy that friends Neal and Morgan follow. First comes humane and ethical operating practices (fair-trade chocolate, for example). Local is the next priority (conventionally grown lettuce from nearby generates less petroleum consumption than the organic from four states away. Next, they seek out the product with the least packaging (buying in bulk, whenever possible) and — finally — organic.

They also use a few Web sites for more information. I’m going to get their list — and share it soon.