For travelers concerned about the impact of your frequent flying, the trip-tracking slash social-networking site Dopplr has you in their sights (and site). The service lets you share information about trips you're taking with those you know and like or work with (sometimes the same people), so that when you head to city X, you can find out who's there at the same time because they live there or are also traveling.
What's new is a Your Carbon tab that appears in the Your Trips section of the site. Working with AMEE (Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine), an open-source, public-data carbon-footprint calculating project and firm, Dopplr can show a good estimate of the greenhouse gases you're releasing into the environment.
Carbon footprint is, of course, just one piece of a much bigger puzzle that we have to untangle to keep life sustainable on the planet. You may or may not believe the scale of human impact on the earth's temperature; fine. But the millions of tons of plastic swirling in the ocean, pollutants in our waters, pesticides in our food, and micro-particulants in the air, are simple facts.
For an excellent take on integrating your worldview around all we have to cope with, read Worldchanging's Alex Steffen's counter-point essay in a recent issued of Wired that itself was devoted to rebutting conventional wisdom, and Steffen's follow-up essay on how he thinks Wired got their issue focus wrong.
Just as the food industry decided from a few studies that soy was good for us, and then put soy into nearly every processed food, so, too, is there a worrisome reductionist trend related to environmental harm and mitigation.
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