Green Conundrums

There is a whole slew of advice articles on WiseBread about driving smarter to get better gas mileage. Of course getting better gas mileage has two lovely advantages: less money poured into the gas tank, and fewer emissions poured into the atmosphere.
But this driving smart advice has created a few questions. Driving green and frugal isn't as simple as it sounds. For example,

• Is it better to accelerate once, hard (higher emissions!), so I can coast (lower emissions!) down that slightly sloped stretch of road between my house and the coffee shop, or should I use the traditional go slow method of gas conservation and produce the same, level amount of emissions the whole distance?


• Is it better to take a longer, back-roads route that will allow me to keep my speed down (fewer emissions) and my braking to a minimum, or take the highway route that requires more speed (more emissions) but is a much shorter distance?

These are the kind of things I ponder. Driving questions bring up more green questions. Should I keep using my mascara past the six-month "safe to use" date to avoid purchasing more packaged products before necessary? Is the safety of the planet worth a potential bacterial infection in my eyes? I have to admit that though I know, in a "universal priorities" kind of way, the entire atmosphere is more important than my eyes, I'm still not really willing to take an eye infection for it. Please don't suggest not wearing mascara. Maybe I should just buy this Make Your Own Mascara pack, but that's even more packaging. Isn't it better to just keep buying the one little bottle every six months instead of the at-home that appears to include about a dozen plastic packages?
And then there's the buying local and organic food complication. I live in a little town. Little. We have two grocery stores, neither of which carries anything organic. However, if I get in my car and drive (efficiently, of course) to the slightly bigger town 6 miles away, I can buy organic produce. If I drive to the even bigger town another 15 miles away, I can buy local, organic produce from the farmer's market. So what's the trade-off? Is the beneficial effect of buying local, organic produce worth the huffing and puffing of my car to get there?
I have no answers. This sustainable stuff gets kind of complicated sometimes, and I take a perverse delight in following the green tips down the road of long-term effects, where sometimes I find that the purportedly eco-friendly practices end up producing more waste and requiring more energy.
It comes down to common sense, most of the time. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: green is trendy, and that makes "green" practices far, far too popular to be trusted by name only. You've got to do your own thinking about what actually makes sense, long-term, in a changing your lifestyle kind of way. That's green that is sustainable.

Image Credits: DerrickT.