One day, maybe I'll be pure enough.

When I dry my hands, if I take an extra paper towel by accident, I feel guilty about wasting it.

When my boys ask me to play in the sink with the water running, I usually let them, but part of me feels guilty about them wasting water this way.

My recycler tells me they don’t process glass of any kind. But, since I’ve recycled most of my life, throwing a bottle in the trash feels terribly unnatural and, consequently, I feel guilty about it.

Environmentalism just seems to be the sort of thing where you can never feel like you’ve done enough because there’s always a way to find fault.

You buy organic produce. But is it grown locally?
You drive a hybrid. But couldn’t you have ridden your bike?
You wash clothes by hand. But is your soap bio-degradable?
Your toilet is super-low-flow. But couldn’t you compost?

And what happens is when you finally internalize this fault-finder, the result is a continuous feeling of guilt and inadequacy, all of which makes me wonder: Wouldn’t the Pharisees have made wonderful environmentalists?