How Green Is Too Green?

How far would you go to reduce your ecological footprint? Would you run your car on waste vegetable oil? Use your lawn as a bathroom to save water? Huddle for body heat? Unplug the fridge? Some 7% of the population is “dark green,” the New York Times reports, though the jury’s still out on whether the so-called "carborexics" are eco-heroes or borderline obsessive-compulsive.

One man is keeping all the trash he generates in a year and blogging about the pileup, while another is working on a movie and book on spending a year without harming the planet. “What these people are doing is fantastic, needed, and catalytic,” an environmental author says. A psychiatrist, however, worries that it’s a sign of disorder—if “you’re criticizing friends because they’re not living up to your standards of green, that’s a problem.”