The Chicago Tribune went out into the Chicagoland area (which is what they call, you know, the area around Chicago) to find the Chicagoan with the lowest carbon footprint, and they came up with Ken Dunn, a 65-year old who is so green his carbon footprint is only about ten percent that of your average American.

Let’s go down the list of what makes Dunn such a lean green fighting machine, minus the fighting.   And the machine.   But the article litearlly does call him “very lean” and “green.”  So anyway.

He rides a bike instead of driving.   He air-dries all his clothes.   He grows his own vegetables.   He heats his home with a wood-burning furnace.   He eats expired and discarded food he gets from his job as a recycler. Due to all this, Dunn produces 3,800 pounds of carbon a year, as opposed to the American average of 44,000.

The difference between Dunn’s annual emissions and the average is the equivalent of chopping down 600 square feet of Amazon rain forest or driving a Honda Accord 60,300 miles on the highway, according to figures provided by Zeke Hausfather, chief energy scientist at Climate Culture, an Internet start-up company that did contest calculations for the Tribune.

Dunn’s job is not only in recycling - he is the founder and director of the Resource Center, a non-profit organization that focuses on recycling, reuse, and urban farming.

Though not all of us are either able or willing to match Dunn in his carbon-saving ways, even though Dunn is “living at roughly the level of carbon emissions that scientists at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the average human must achieve by 2100 if we are to avoid dangerous effects of global warming.”  But if you want to smart small (no harm in that, right?), you can takepart and visit Carbon Footprint, where you can figure out how much you’re emitting, and look for ways to reduce that amount.