What’s yours: Going green? Go to the Web for some ideas

Talking about sustainability is one thing, but living day-to-day life with the future in mind is something altogether different — and difficult.

Mention the words “green living” and many people might imagine macramé and driftwood furniture. I probably would have thought that, too, before I stumbled upon inhabitat.com. This blog, which focuses on the fashionable and artistic side of furniture, clothing and housing, seems to specialize in systematically destroying my beliefs about sustainable living.

Think, Fifth Avenue Penthouse — not commune.

For me, “pre-fab” used to conjure images of cheesy double-wide trailers. Now, I can’t help but see sleek modern homes built with recycled materials and embedded solar panels. It’s enough to make any design buff start drooling.

Moving with my fiancée to Spokane this year from the decidedly crunchy state of Oregon raised some tough questions about where we would live. I was obviously not in the market for a modernist pre-fab, so the biggest hurdle we faced was how we would maintain our nearly car-free existence in a city that seems to share a planning department with Los Angeles.

It’s no surprise to anyone who’s read http://metro spokane.typepad.com/ that we would eventually choose to live in a historic downtown apartment. That site, apart from being a brilliant booster of civic improvements, convinced me to move into any area that many Spokanites seem to still regard as blighted.

So far, living downtown has meant easy access to nightlife, work, entertainment and shopping and all without a car. I end up walking at least a mile daily.

That lifestyle is perfect for anyone looking to ditch the troublesome habit of driving to get to the gym, and for anyone looking to shift away from sprawl living I’ve got to recommend walkability.com. This site is a phenomenal Google Maps mashup that counts the proximity of any address to the essentials of everyday living like schools, dining and drug stores.

Count them all up and the site offers any given address a score between one and 100; the higher the score the easier it is to get by without turning the key on your car.

Recently, I’ve been looking to push my sustainability further, and an article in The New York Times put me on the scent of a pair of bloggers — at http://www.noimpact man.typepad.com/blog — undertaking an experiment to spend a year without “impact.”

Living in Manhattan, they do absolutely crazy things; composting food waste under their sink, forgoing toilet paper and relying on a single fluorescent lamp, but they also do little things. In the past six months reading this site has made me question some of the mundane wastes in my own life.

Today, plastic vegetable bags, one-use grocery bags and paper towels are now officially out in the Neuman household, and — you know — it wasn’t so difficult.