Environmentalist.

The word's got baggage. It conjures images of people sitting in trees to save the spotted owl or piloting whaling protest boats. They look different, hippie-like, with long unkempt hair and trailing the smell of patchouli behind them.

That's not me.

I want to touch the planet gently, to tread lightly. But calling myself an environmentalist is like putting on a sweater that's slightly too small. It keeps me warm, but it's uncomfortable, and I keep tugging at it.

In part, I feel it would be a lie for me to claim that word as my own. Like I'd suddenly be a member of a club when I haven't paid the dues. And when the real environmentalists found out, they'd take away my backyard garden.

You see, while I want to do the right thing by the planet, I don't always do it. And sometimes, when I make the decision to do something that's environmentally-friendly, being kind to the earth is just an added, unintentional, bonus.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I watch "The Dog Whisperer" on the National Geographic Channel. They've been hyping the heck out of a new program - "Human Footprint" - that collects the entire sum of a product a person uses in a lifetime in one place.

For an average American, that's 19,826 eggs, 5,054 newspapers, 26,112 glasses of milk, 5,067 bananas, 43,371 cans of soda and 3,796 diapers, according to the program's Web site.

I really want to watch the program. The idea fascinates me. But I hesitate to turn it on. I'm afraid it will shatter my ability to fool myself into thinking I'm doing enough, even though I know I'm not.

For example, except for newspapers, we don't recycle. I know it's dumb. And there's a dumb reason for it, too: We don't have a good place to put a second garbage can for the recyclables.

About once a month I start piling cans and bottles up on the counter, with the intention of getting recycling bags and setting something up in the garage. I never get around to it, and at the end of that week we throw all the cans into the garbage and take it to the curb.

On the other hand, our new kitchen floor is really an old one. We used recycled oak floor boards my parents had bought from someone tearing it out of a bungalow 25 years ago. They match the original floors in the rest of our house perfectly, and we could never have afforded hardwood in the kitchen otherwise.

We use cloth diapers whenever we're at home. Day care uses disposables, and our son goes through about 20 of those a week.

The cloth diapering was my choice. I couldn't wrap my brain around the amount of diapers that would be coming out of the house in garbage bags.

I figured an extra load or two of laundry each week wouldn't be so bad. (Though, in the interest of full disclosure, we've been using a diaper service, so I've never really had to do the diaper laundry.)

A recent article on Slate.com found there was a difference in energy associated with manufacturing disposables and making and laundering cloth diapers - cloth won that green war, though not by much. But, the writer didn't take the garbage factor into account.

As a side note, the "Human Footprint" diaper figure seems incredibly low to me. It calculates out to about 3½ diapers per day, every day, from birth to age 3. Granted, my kiddo's only 5 months old, but he's been using 8-12 diapers a day pretty consistently. I've seen other figures as high as 6,000 diapers per kid, from birth to potty-training.

We grow most of our vegetables in the summer. That's one of those green bonus items. We grow the veggies because we think they taste better, and we like having the vegetable garden. We don't use fertilizers or pesticides, so there's no added pollution from the plants we grow. It also cuts down on fossil fuel use because for the summer months at least, we're not buying vegetables trucked in from elsewhere.

The next time we need a car, we're thinking about a hybrid. I'd love to buy a diesel and fill it up with converted vegetable oil at the corner gas station, but I'm not sure when that's going to be possible.

My well-intentioned but half-done attempts at gentle living are what the "green" movement is all about. It removes the political connotation of "environmentalist" and lets people make their own decisions about how to help the planet, whether it's through action or spending extra money on green products.

While I'm generally happy with the things we do to be kind to the planet, there are some things I'll always feel bad about not following through on.

I've been consistently meeting my New Year's resolution of cooking and eating at home more often. Maybe it's time for some Earth Day resolutions:

Buy local eggs.

Compost our food waste.

Recycle.

Check back in a few months to see how I do.