Green awards need cleaning

Leaving last month's "Greening the Future Awards", the words of the boldly charismatic Lewis Pugh rang in my ears: "We need to break this problem down in manageable chunks . make the decision today to live in a sustainable future."

He was quite a force to sit next to - I suppose you have to be if you're going to swim 1km in -10C wearing nothing but a speedo.

Having parked right at the end of the car park (I arrived late) I walked past row upon row of SUVs, and wondered at the heavy footprint of the country's supposedly most environmentally conscious group of people. So much for South Africa's top green executives starting with green at home.

But any moral grandstanding was quickly cut short by the click of my own gas-guzzling Audi unlocking.

A greeny at heart, I am ashamedly still very much part of the oil economy. Of course, I've got my own excuses for my driving choice - hybrid technologies are still too early stage, electric power from Eskom is still dirty and so on - but these just hide my basic resistance to an inconvenient but inevitable change in my own driving habits.

Driving home, I started thinking about being credibly green and making a difference. As Pugh said, it takes small and incremental steps to cross a great distance. We are easily put off by a challenge that is just so large, and think, "What difference can I make"? If we add up all the little steps sustained over time, we will have come very far. But these little steps need a much greater push, given the sense of urgency and commitment.

Let's start this week with one simple change. Catch the Gautrain to that meeting in Pretoria or Johannesburg, change to energy-efficient light bulbs, separate and recycle waste at home, or use a bio-degradable detergent.

These little things will prepare us for the much harder changes in our own lifestyles: the cars we drive, where we live in relation to where we work, and how often we fly - carbon footprints that are complicated and expensive to change. Small steps, taken by lots of us, all moving in the same direction, over time, create a revolution, a fundamental shift to a low carbon economy.

Let's hope that, at the next green award ceremony there will be as many bicycles as automobiles.