Let's start with the meat. According to a recent E Magazine story, "a 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn and only two producing cattle." The consequences of that statistic are mind-boggling.

First off, it's clear that hunger is nothing more than a product of inequitable distribution. It makes the claims that expensive biotechnology advances will be used to feed people worse than laughable.

Beyond that, consider the wasted land, wasted water and huge manure stream resulting from a meat-based diet. A vegetarian diet, on average, will save about an acre of land per year that would otherwise be needed for farm animals. Want to conserve water during the drought? You could save more water by cutting a pound of top-grade beef from your diet than you could by not showering for an entire year. Going veggie would also put a dent in the 87,000 pounds of excrement that livestock produces every second.

Clearly, cutting back on meat consumption can help the environment tremendously. So can cutting back on your driving. Hopefully we all know by now that cars pump out nasty chemicals that contribute to smog, acid rain and global warming. That information should be more than enough to sway us on the car issue, but consider also the drilling that's needed to feed our humongous oil habit. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and countless other pristine areas, would be a lot safer if we weren't dying for crude.

And even if you drive a zero-emissions, solar-powered vehicle, don't forget about the other environmental impacts of our car culture. Barreling down the road in an automobile, you need about 70 to 100 square feet of space. That's one heck of a lot of pavement. According to the book Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, "For every car registered in Pennsylvania-and the total approaches 7 million-there are five or six unused parking spaces." Sprawl, urban decay and strip malls all result from our love affair with cars. Just imagine all the green space available if trains, subways, monorails and mountain bikes were our choice modes of transportation.

Obviously, becoming a vegetarian and ditching the family car won't accomplish all of these environmental benefits alone. If you make some serious lifestyle changes, and nobody else does, global warming, sprawl, hunger and more are still going to rage on at full force. Which leads me to think yours could be a trick question.

Personal lifestyle choices are important, but the single most environmentally-friendly decision you can make as an individual is to get involved in your community. Dedicating your life to improving public transportation or to marketing veggie burgers will do a lot more for the environment than living in a low-impact hut off in the woods somewhere.

See past questions here.

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