I’m heading home from an eight-day, action-packed vacation in Alaska. Hiking, biking and sea-kayaking, I saw snow-capped mountains, the largest ice field in North America, a couple of glaciers, countless bays and rivers, abundant and beautiful wildflowers, salmon swimming upstream, bald eagles, seals, a sea otter, marmots, a porcupine and bears (three!) – all in one corner of the state, the Kenai Peninsula. But what really impressed me was the women.

There are surely more women who call themselves feminists on New York’s Upper West Side than there are in, say, Anchorage. But women in Alaska — at least the ones that we met – are plenty strong and self-reliant.

Of the 199 runners who completed the grueling Crow Pass marathon this past Saturday, twenty-eight were women. I hiked the first three or four miles of the course, which was rocky, steep, snow-covered in parts and criss crossed by several streams that were tricky to negotiate. (They say it gets easier after an icy, waist-deep river crossing.) Along the way, we met a couple of large, white-haired women who had to be well over 60. No, they weren’t runners, but they had come out to cheer the competitors and so had camped out amidst the bears in the mountains above the trail the night before, backpacking in for several miles with their tent, sleeping bags, gas stove, etc. I wish I’d asked them if they were carrying guns.

Our guide that day was a forty-something woman named Beth Branson. Beth grew up in Colorado, coached women’s basketball for a few years at Colorado College and then worked as a teacher in Colorado and Hawaii where she took her students on diving and camping trips. She and her husband, Perry, raised their three boys in Hawaii but decided about five years ago that they missed the mountains and wanted to see more of the world.

Since then, they’ve been renting a house during the summers in Girdwood, a touristy town outside Anchorage. During the rest of the year, they travel, following the sun to the southern hemisphere and living out of a tent. (They store everything else they own, mostly books, in their Chevy truck back in Girdwood.) They’ve seen lots of the backcountry of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and will head back to South Africa in a few months and then meet up with their sons in Thailand.

Needless to say, Beth is tough—she once completed a 111-mile, day-long bike ride over three mountain peaks in Colorado, known as the “triple bypass.” She is also a nature enthusiast, who is able to share her knowledge through her work as a guide with a small Alaska company called The Ascending Path. By being purposeful about her life, she has carved out an unconventional existence for herself that aligns her values, her passions and her work.

A few days earlier, Alison O’Hara, another forty-something transplant to Alaska, had led a group of us on a sea-kayaking expedition around a small island called Yukon Island in Kachemak Bay. It was a marvelous trip, despite chilly, cloudy, drizzly weather; that’s where we saw the sea otter, seals and eagles, as well as a slew of sea birds. Alison got a bunch of kayaking novices (including me) safely around the island, fed us lunch including hot tea, and shared her knowledge of the bay and its wildlife.

A native New Yorker, Alison came to Alaska more than 20 years ago and in 1992 started a business called True North Kayak Adventures in Homer. She’s got six employees, and seems to be doing very well, especially after winning favorable reviews in places like The New York Times and Frommer’s. She clearly loves being out on the water

Alison and her husband, who works as a brewer, along with their seven-year-old daughter and dogs, live in an eco-friendly house they have been building for about five years that’s a mile from the nearest road. The dogs are more than pets; they are sled dogs and the principal means of transportation from home into town during the winter when the path to their house is covered in snow. While the house is connected to the electricity grid and to phone lines, water is delivered by truck and they have yet to get around to installing indoor plumbing.

“That’s crazy,” exclaimed a dyed-in-the-wool feminist on our trip.

But is it? I’m all in favor of indoor plumbing, but temporarily giving up some comfort may be a price worth paying in order to live in a beautiful place and do work that you enjoy.

What’s crazier—living in the Alaska woods without plumbing or living in a distant suburb of Washington, New York or LA and spending a couple of hours every day commuting in rush-hour traffic to a joyless desk job? Millions of Americans spend their lives that way, and no one calls them crazy.

The plastics industry is dealing with a nightmare these days when it comes to potentially toxic chemicals. Because so many people no longer trust big business or federal regulators to protect them and their health—perhaps with reason, perhaps not—companies are vulnerable to campaigns by activist groups, politicians and trial lawyers who want to get alleged dangerous toxics off the market. The latest example: Bisphenol-A, the chemical used in polycarbonate bottles, including baby bottles, and in the linings of aluminum cans and in many, many other products.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time—more than I’d intended to—looking into the controversy around BPA. The result is a column that was posted today on fortune.com and cnnmoney.com. The FORTUNE websites is also running a video in which I talk about the issue. Originally, I had hoped that my research into BPA would develop into a much longer story for FORTUNE but the piece never really came together, in part because I found myself conflicted over the safety issues. Also, to be honest, it became clear to me that I don’t have the depth of experience reporting on the FDA or on toxic chemicals to write a definitive FORTUNE story about BPA.

Having said that, I’ve come to the conclusion that the BPA story is, in essence, about trust. It’s another bit of evidence to support my argument that it makes business sense in the long run for companies to be responsible and prudent, even if that costs them money today; regaining trust, once it’s been lost, is both terribly difficult and expensive. It also strikes me that industries that try to weaken government regulation or plant their own people inside regulatory agencies run the risk of getting burned in the end. That’s because when we lost trust in our regulators—as we seem to have lost faith in the FDA—we are left with mob rule, as manufacturers and retailers (i.e., Wal-Mart) come under pressure to stop making and selling perfectly legal products. Strong and predictable regulation, it seems to me, is better for business as well as for the rest of us than the chaos now surrounding BPA.

So feel free to look at the column which is a much abbreviated version of a longer draft that I will post below. Here’s how it begins:

How, exactly, did Wal-Mart become the new Food and Drug Administration?

The giant retailer, along with CVS and Toys ‘R Us, announced recently that it plans to stop selling baby bottles containing the chemical bisphenol-A.

The question is, why? Bisphenol-A has been widely used since the 1950s. The Food and Drug Administration, as well as Japanese and European regulators, have no problems with it. Canada is about to ban it from baby bottles, but officials term the move purely precautionary

And here, for those who want to know more, is my full story:

When did Wal-Mart become the new FDA?

The giant retailer, along with CVS and Toys ‘R Us, says it will stop selling baby bottles containing a controversial chemical called bisphenol-A. The California state Senate has voted to prohibit the use of BPA in children’s products. Nalgene, which makes water jugs, is phasing out BPA, too. And powerful Congressmen want BPA removed from cans of infant formula.

The question is, why? The FDA says bisphenol-A is perfectly safe. So do Japanese and European regulators, who tend to be more cautious. Even the government of Canada, which plans to ban the chemical from baby bottles, recently assured its citizens that this was done “as a precautionary measure.”

BPA, you should know, is everywhere. The chemical is used to make polycarbonate, a rigid, clear plastic used in bottles, bike helmets, CDs, DVDs and automobile headlights. It’s also used to make epoxy resins, which are used as coatings in food and drink cans as well as dental sealants. You’re probably carrying around some BPA right now: About 93% of Americans tested by the Centers for Disease Control had the chemical in their urine. About 6 billion pounds of chemical were made last year.

The trouble is, numerous studies of laboratory animals have linked small doses of BPA to breast cancers, prostate cancer, brain abnormalities and reproductive health problems. Other scientists argue that the chemical, which has been widely used since the 1950s, is perfectly safe. The fact is, there’s a good deal of scientific uncertainty about bisphenol-A. That’s not surprising, because we rely on animal studies to predict the effects of chemicals on humans, and extrapolating from mice to you and me isn’t easy.

But this story isn’t fundamentally about science. It’s about the politics of BPA. More broadly, it’s about how we, as a society, make decisions about health and safety, at a time when we no longer trust the government or industry to protect us. Because we’ve lost faith in those big institutions, battles over a slew of products and processes—genetically modified foods, the irradiation of meat, or phthalates in cosmetics or children’s toys—are being fought in the court of public opinion, for better or worse.

In the case of BPA, the market for hard-plastic baby and sport bottles collapsed suddenly this spring because of a hard-hitting campaign against the chemical by activist groups, concerned scientists, politicians, and trial lawyers. They spread fears about BPA that eventually convinced nervous retailers to turn away from children’s products containing the chemical. As an expert in crisis PR noted, wryly, “Wal-Mart is the new FDA.”

For companies that make chemicals or use them in consumer products, this is a real worry. It’s a whole lot easier to frighten people than it is to reassure them, especially when talking about kids. “The science can’t compete with the emotion,” says Steve Hentges, a chemist and a lobbyist with the American Chemistry Council, an industry group that lately has been on the losing end of the BPA battles.

If the most determined opponents of BPA get their way and drive the chemical out of the food supply, consumers will pay the costs. Some BPA-free plastic bottles sell for $10 each, more than twice the price of bottles with BPA. Baby bottles made of glass can break, potentially causing injury. Replacing BPA in the lining of aluminum cans would mean retooling all that packaging, and it’s not clear that there are safe alternatives.

Those costs are worth paying to protect our health, environmentalist say. They argue that if government regulators can’t or won’t do the job of regulating potentially toxic chemicals, then it makes perfect sense for advocacy groups, politicians, an aggressive media and even Wal-Mart to step in.

“The federal regulatory system for chemicals is broken,” declares Richard Liroff, the executive director of the Investor Environmental Health Network, a nonprofit that works with companies on issues of toxics. “We have largely incapacitated the government to make the kinds of decisions that we ought to be able to look to government to make. So there’s a lot to be said for having big companies slice through the knot and say we have to make decisions for our good, for our customers’ good and for the good of society.”

If nothing else, the BPA battles underscores how rapidly markets can by reshaped by activist campaigns and consumer sentiments, both magnified by the Internet. A handful of companies emerged as winners this spring: Whole Foods Market, which pulled BPA baby bottles and cups off its shelves several years ago; Eastman Chemical, which introduced a plastic alternative called Triton last year; and Born Free, a private company started in 2006 specifically to provide BPA-free baby bottles. Others, including SABIC Innovative Plastics, which was formerly the plastics division of GE and is now the U.S.’s biggest manufacturer of BPA, presumably saw sales decline. (SABIC declined to comment on the financial impact.) Baby-bottle makers including Avent America, Evenflo and Gerber Products are now being sued because they sold products made with BPA.

This spring’s BPA battles were fought like a political campaign, complete with catchy soundbites, press releases, personal attacks, and warring websites. One prominent and controversial crusader is Dr. Frederick vom Saal, who has been researching BPA for more than a decade. Vom Saal has testified before state legislatures and appeared on such TV programs as PBS’s Frontline and ABC’s 20/20 to denounce BPA in terms that gloss over scientific uncertainty. Referring to the fact that BPA is a mild estrogen, he says things like “the idea that you’re using sex hormones to make plastic is just totally insane.”

Vom Saal has contempt for the chemical industry. He accuses a Dow Chemical executive of trying to bribe him, a charge the company strongly denies. “The willingness to be dishonest seems to be the criteria for these people being hired and representing the chemical industry,” vom Saal says.

The chemical industry, in turn, wants to discredit vom Saal. One industry source showed FORTUNE a video news release produced by Born Free, which makes BPA-free baby products, in which vom Saal warns of the dangers of BPA. “We know it causes breast cancer and prostate cancer when exposure occurs in early life,” he declares. He also consulted with the New York-based law firm of Robert Weiss, which has filed three class action lawsuits against baby bottle manufacturers, according to the firm’s website.

Asked about this, vom Saal says he has not taken any money from any company or law firm, although he may testify as an expert witness, as many academics do, if the class-action suits against BPA go to trial. He notes—accurately—that it was only after lawyers brought civil actions against the tobacco industry and asbestos makers that we learned the full truth about the dangers of their products, and how the industries failed to protect the public health.

If vom Saal were the only scientist warning about the dangers of BPA, he could be marginalized. But dozens more are sounding alarms. Sarah Janssen, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, is a medical doctor with who a master’s in public health and a PhD in reproductive biology. She won’t let her 10-month-old daughter be exposed to BPA through baby bottles, sippy cups or infant formula. “For peace of mind,” she says. “really what we need is a comprehensive ban.”

Fenton Communications, a Washington, D.C. PR firm, is another key warrior against BPA. Fenton’s clients have included Born Free and its BPA-free bottles; an activist group called the Environmental Working Group that has led the fight against BPA for years; and trial lawyers. Fenton also works for liberal advocacy groups like MoveOn that support Democrats in Congress—New York Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, among others—who have sponsored legislation to ban BPA from children’s products..

Sometimes these groups appear to work in concert. Last year, the Environmental Working Group tested canned foods for BPA and found that “many Americans are exposed to BPA above levels shown to be harmful in laboratory studies.” This year, a congressional investigation led by Reps. John Dingell and Bart Stupak asked manufacturers of infant formula (including Hain-Celestial Group Inc., Mead Johnson & Company, Nestle USA, Abbott and Wyeth Nutrition) to provide information on their use of BPA in the lining of cans. The companies said the linings did contain BPA (as everyone knew by then) and that the cans were safe to use. Nevertheless, Dingell and Stupak subsequently asked the infant formula companies to voluntarily remove BPA from their cans. They declined. All this generated headlines—and worry.

The chemical industry has tried to get its message out, too. See the websites www.bisphenol-a.org and www.factsonplastic.com , which come up at the top of Google’s search offerings to offer a defense of BPA. But the industry is often depicted as a “special interest group,” while environmentalists and politicians are seen as serving the “public interest.” It isn’t that simple, of course. Controversy helps the green groups raise money, Democratic politicians look for ways to find fault with the Bush administration. And the trial lawyers sense a big payday.

The problem for the chemical industry is that its track record doesn’t inspire confidence. The Dingell-Stupak investigation of BPA looked at what the congressmen call “science for sale,” and uncovered embarrassing documents. One target: The Weinberg Group, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm that has made a business out of defending products that are under attack. (Its clients included the American Chemistry Council.) In a 2003 letter to DuPont, a Weinberg consultant wrote that, “We will harness … the scientific and intellectual capacity of our company with one goal in mind – creating the outcome our client desires.” Needless to say, this is not how science is supposed to work.

David Michaels is a George Washington University professor and the author of new book called Doubt is Their Product, about the misuse of science by industry. Corporate efforts to manipulate science and avoid regulation are now backfiring, he argues, because all science funded by industry has come under a cloud. “The work of mercenary scientists hurts the credibility of all scientists,” Michaels says.

This became a key element of the attack on BPA. When an FDA executive told Congress that the agency had relied on two industry-funded studies in its analysis of BPA, Dingell pounced. “This raises serious concerns about whether the science FDA relied on to approve the use of Bisphenol A was bought and paid for by industry,” he said. The problem is, the FDA does not have the money to conduct independent studies of the thousands of chemicals on the market. It has to rely on industry research. “It’s industry that’s required to do the testing, and then FDA reviews that,” says Hentges, of the chemistry industry group.

In April, all the news had turned bad for BPA. Media reports stoked fears. “There is no safe level of BPA,” declared Dr. Nancy Snyderman, an NBC medical reporter, on the Today show. (Maybe NBC is the new FDA?) The Canadian government recommended its ban on baby bottles with BPA. A lengthy draft report from the National Toxicology Program, a federal body that is part of the National Institutes of Health, found “some concern” about the effect of BPA on fetuses, infants and children at current exposure levels and concluded that “the possibility that bisphenol A may alter human development cannot be dismissed.” The NTP report (available at http://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/media/questions/sya-bpa.cfm ) is a model of clarity in the sea of uncertainty surrounding BPA. But it is too long and nuanced to be appreciated in the court of public opinion, where the BPA battle is being fought.

In the space of a few days, Wal-Mart, Toy ‘R Us and CVS said they will phase out baby bottles containing BPA. Nalgen and Playtex also said they will stop using the chemical.

I emailed Wal-Mart to ask why the company is removing a legal product, which may or may not be dangerous, from its shelves, while continuing to sell other products, like cigarettes, which are incontrovertibly harmful. Linda Brown Blakley, a company spokeswoman, replied: “We sell products our customers want to buy. Our customers are telling us they want this option.”

Now that the retailers have agreed to take baby bottles with BPA off their shelves, you can be sure they will come under pressure to get rid of infant formula cans lined with the chemical. Will cans of soup, soda and beer be next?

And is this any way to make judgments about public health?

“The market can’t solve this problem,” says David Michaels, the professor who has written extensively about science and regulation. (His website is www.defendingscience.org.) “Wal-Mart and Target may stop selling the products, but I’ll bet you that the Dollar Store will keep selling them, just as they sold tainted toys from China.”

Hentges, the industry lobbyist, says: “You want qualified scientists making these decisions.” Well, sure, but qualified scientists disagree about BPA.

There’s an irony here. Traditionally, industries have opposed strong regulation. They don’t want the government looking over their shoulder or telling them what products they can and cannot sell. The BPA saga might be a reason for companies to rethink that position—because, at least in this case, the fact that the government regulators are perceived as weak or under-funded or too friendly to industry has helped create the nightmare the chemical industry is now living.

–end–

There’s no doubt that buying and eating local food is a hot trend. But is it good for the environment?

Recently, I got a press release from Wal-Mart saying that

Partnerships with local farmers have grown by 50 percent over the past two years—one example of the company’s efforts to support local economies, cut shipping costs and provide fresh food offerings.

For the 4th of July, a Wal-Mart Supercenter in DeKalb County, Ga., featured Georgia-grown Vidalia onions for burgers, Georgia cantaloupes and watermelons for fruit salad and Georgia peaches for cobbler, the company said.

Meanwhile, Chipotle Mexican Grill reports that it has stepped up its efforts to buy local produce. The fast food chain says it is the first and only national restaurant company committed to buying local on a significant scale:

Chipotle will purchase 25 percent of at least one of its produce items for each of its 730-plus restaurants from small and mid-sized local farms. The produce, which includes romaine lettuce, green bell and jalapeno peppers, and red onions, will arrive from local farms when seasonally available

What’s more, locally grown produce was voted No. 2 on a list of nearly 200 hot trends for 2008 in a survey of more than 1,200 professional chefs conducted by the Natural Restaurant Association. (Bite-sized desserts led the list.) A week or so ago, my wife and I tried a brand-new restaurant called Redwood in Bethesda, sure enough the menu is filled with beef, cheese and produce from the mid-Atlantic states.

Last week, too, The New York Times ran a story about community-supported agriculture on its front page—a reliable lagging cultural indicator, as ever.

Now, I’m a fan of local eating. Since joining a CSA last year, I’ve consumed a lifetime’s worth of Swiss chard. Buying local food supports the local economy, cuts down on shipping costs and greenhouse gases, encourages (or requires) consumers to broaden their palette of food choices (i.e., the chard) and gets fruits and vegetables to the table when they are fresher. That’s all laudable.

But before we get carried away, let’s keep a couple of things in mind. The first is that being a locavore is utterly impractical for the vast majority of people. It’s no surprise that the local-food movement is most popular in northern California, where you can get fresh produce year-round. I’m currently on vacation in Alaska where, as best as I can tell, they grow berries, catch a lot of fish and kill caribou. Not exactly a balanced diet—in fact, it makes me wonder how the Native Alaskans survived for as long as they did without imports. I enjoy a banana on my cereal or in a smoothie, and they don’t grow in the continental U.S. (Pity the farmers of Costa Rica and Ecuador if we were all to become locavores.)

The other thing to remember is that what we eat, and how it’s produced, matters a lot more to the planet that where our food is grown. As I’ve written before, the single easiest thing any of us can do to help prevent global warming is to eat less meat. This is confirmed by a life cycle assessment by Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University, who found that when it comes to greenhouse gasese, food miles matter a whole lot less than agricultural production:

They found that transportation creates only 11% of the 8.1 metric tons (t) of greenhouse gases (in CO2 equivalents) that an average U.S. household generates annually as a result of food consumption. The agricultural and industrial practices that go into growing and harvesting food are responsible for most (83%) of its greenhouse gas emissions

Small changes in dietary habits can have significant environmental impacts, they report:

Replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week reduces emissions equal to 760 miles per year of driving. And switching to vegetables one day per week cuts the equivalent of driving 1160 miles per year.

That’s because everything we eat comes from plants, whether we eat the plants directly or rely on an inefficient animal intermediary to process them for us, as the excellent new website of the Peanut Butter and Jelly campaign points out:

The basic problem is that animals are inefficient at converting plants into meat, milk, and eggs. Relatively little of what they eat ends up in what you eat because animals use most of their food to keep them alive – to fuel their muscles so they can stand up and walk around, to keep their hearts beating, to keep their brains working.

That cow, pig, or chicken has to eat a lot more protein, carbohydrates, and other nutrients than it yields in meat, eggs, or milk. The result is that it takes several pounds of corn and soy to produce one pound of beef, or one pound of eggs, one pound of milk, etc. This holds true even if we’re measuring calories or protein; it takes several times the calories or protein in livestock feed to produce the calories or protein we get from the meat, eggs, or milk.

Check out the PB&J campaign. It’s the creation of a young Wesleyan graduate who we will call Bernard Brown. (He has a day job, and isn’t sure how his employer feels about his campaign on behalf of peanut butter sandwiches). “If you have a PB&J instead of a red-meat lunch like a ham sandwich or a hamburger,” he says, “you shrink your carbon footprint by almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Bernard’s little web startup, launched early 2007, has generated some interesting ripples, including coverage in Good Housekeeping magazine and support from, of all places, the giant food services company Sodexho which worked the PB&J campaign message into Earth Day events on several college campuses. He’s even designed a PB&J campaign T-shirt (made with organic cotton, natch) and baby bib.

No offense to the locavores, but I’ll take a PB&J sandwich over a plate of Swiss chard any day.

One of the great things about the environmental movement is that it provides cover for those of us who are, shall we say, prudent about spending money. You can probably guess where I’m going here. Now, when I tell my wife that, no, we don’t really need to turn on the AC even though it’s 78 degrees outside, or when I urge my daughter to spend just a little less time in the shower, or when I cringe at the way we waste food in our home, I am no longer a skinflint or cheapskate. Seizing the moral high ground, I am now the guardian of our family’s carbon footprint.

Unfortunately, there are times when my intention to be “green” and to be frugal come into conflict–which brings us to my new car.

I’m not into cars, to say the least. I have been perfectly happy with my 1994 Volvo 850, bought used, now with a speedometer reading of about 146,000 miles. The last new car I bought was a Toyota Camry back in the mid-1980s. If everyone were like me, Detroit would have gone down the tubes years ago.

But as the costs of repairing the aging Volvo rose, and the dirt in those hard-to-get-to places was, well, hard to get to, I reluctantly decided that the time had come to replace it. But what to buy? I didn’t want to put a lot of time into car shopping, but I wanted to buy a car that I could feel good about owning and driving. I decided to treat myself to a new car, even though I’m pretty sure that it would be preferable from an economic and environmental standpoint to go with another used car.

So I did a little research and quickly narrowed the field to a handful of models—the Honda Civic (hybrid and conventional), the Honda Fit, the Toyota Prius, the Toyota Corolla and the Ford Focus. I don’t need a lot of car (obviously), which was another reason to let go of the Volvo. I work at home, drive less than 6,000 miles a year, and rarely go farther than the local airports. I’m driving less than ever these days because I recently bought a saddlebag for my bicycle, which I’m now using for the short trips (3 miles each way) to our local coffee shop, bakery, even the supermarket to pick up a few things. (Our kids are grown and my wife has a small Acura sedan we take on the occasional family trip.) So I was looking for a safe, reliable, cheap, environmentally-friendly car.

I signed up for Consumer Reports online, looked over its ratings and crossed the Ford Focus off my list. All things being equal, I would have liked to buy an American car but Consumer Reports says the Focus (a nice looking car, imho) has “handling that is less crisp than before,” is “still noisy,” and the “interior quality is lackluster.” I also gave up on the Toyotas—the Prius because they are ubiquitous and I didn’t want to drive what everyone else seems to be driving (it seems as if all the new cars at Adat Shalom, my synagogue, are Priuses) and the Corolla because, well, there was just nothing about the car that appealed to me. (I don’t claim that this is a rational process.) I also noticed that Toyota also slipped to third, behind Honda and Subaru, last year in Consumer Reports’ annual car reliability survey.

That left the Honda Fit, the Honda Civic and the Civic Hybrid—the car that I really wanted to buy. I test drove all three at a local dealer, liked them all, and then went home to do some math and see whether it made economic sense for me to buy a hybrid.

The numbers surprised me. For purposes of comparison, I looked at the Honda Civix LX 2dr coupe with an MSRP of $16,760 (includes AC, full power accessories, keyless entry, cruise control) and the four-door Hybrid with an MSRP of $22,600 (which includes all of the above features, as best I can tell.) I did a bunch of calculations on my own to see whether it was worth spending $5,840 more for the hybrid engine, and then discovered that Honda is kind enough to put a “savings calculator” on its website. EPA rates the standard Civic at 36 mpg highway/25 mpg city, the Hybrid Civic at 45 mpg highway/40 mpg city. I assumed that I would drive 20 miles a day (which is more than I do) and pay $5 a gallon for gas (which may sound high but I’m looking into the future here).

Honda says my fuel savings would be $1,013 in five years, or $202 a year. That means it would take, oh, about 28.9 years to pay back the extra cost of the hybrid. Yikes! You can quarrel with my calculation—I didn’t take the present-value of money into account, obviously—but not my conclusion.

I couldn’t see spending the extra money for the hybrid. Does this make me less of an environmentalist and more of a cheapskate? I’m afraid it does, but so be it.

I ended up buying the Honda Fit. MSRP is $13,950. EPA mileage is 28 city/ 35 hiway. Consumer Reports gave it a good score and talked about its “impressive interior room and versatility.” Car and Driver put the Fit on its 10 best list. (The Prius and Civic didn’t make it.) Edmunds called the Fit “a triumph of creativity, and proof that desirable cars don’t have to be expensive.”

Besides all that, I really like the way the seats on the car flip up, down and around—it’ll be really easy for me to take my bike places, without messing about with the rack. That cinched the deal.

So why am I sharing this experience with you?

For better or worse, I think my car-buying demonstrates that even “conscious consumers” can’t be counted on to put environmental or social issues at the top of list when buying stuff. I’m ordinarily quite careful about what I buy and from whom, in an effort to support companies that I admire. I wear Timberland boots, sit in a Herman Miller chair, brush my teeth with Tom’s of Maine, run in Nike shorts, drink Starbucks, stay at Marriotts, etc. But my support for better companies and my desire to have a lighter environmental footprint wasn’t enough to get me to spend thousands of dollars more than I need to for a cleaner, greener hybrid car.

Given that I’m more careful about my consumer choices than most Americans, I don’t think we can wait for consumers to drive us closer to a sustainable economy. Companies are likely to lead the way. And (we can hope) governments. What’s needed are companies that offer more good choices (and fewer bad ones), in cars and everything else, and government rules that incent them to do so, with higher CAFÉ standards, greenhouse gas regulation, research to promote alternative fuels and the like.

Here’s the Fit, by the way:

The easy way to do corporate philanthropy is to write a little check to everyone who asks. Many companies operate this way–$5,000 to the Boy’s Club, $5,000 to the YMCA, $5,000 to the local cancer society or heart association. This is mostly a feel-good exercise, performed, it must be said, with other people’s money.

Today’s Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com is about GE, and the company efforts to be strategic in its corporate giving. I met Bob Corcoran, who runs the GE Foundation, on a trip to Ghana in 2004, and had a chance to see GE’s health care initiative in action there—the company donated medical equipment, a generator, money and lots of expertise to a hospital in rural Ghana. Last week, Bob and I had a chance to catch up when he was in Washington.

Here’s how the column begins:

I’m not a big fan of corporate philanthropy. Too often, it’s a feel-good exercise, generating little value for a company’s shareholders. At its worst, it allows CEOs to use other people’s money to glorify themselves. (Tyco once pledged $5 million to Seton Hall University, which named a building or two after its then-CEO, Dennis Kozlowski.) Rarely is corporate giving both benevolent and strategic.

General Electric (GE, Fortune 500) is one company that does philanthropy right. On Monday, the company announced a new donation - a five-year $18 million grant from the GE Foundation to the New York City public schools, the largest-ever single corporate contribution to the school system. New York is the sixth city to join in what GE calls its “Developing Futures” program, which is aimed at improving schools in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Louisville, Stamford, CT and Erie, PA, all places where GE operates. GE has been working on school reform for decades.

The company’s other charitable focus - health care in poor countries - is newer. I had a chance to see it up close in 2004 when I traveled to Ghana, with Bob Corcoran, GE’s vice president for corporate citizenship and president of the GE Foundation. (See Money and Morals at GE in the Fortune archive.) Back then, GE had promised to donate $20 million of equipment and to lend its expertise to public hospitals and clinics in Africa, beginning in Ghana - a country where it does no business. Corcoran and GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, justified the Africa initiative in several ways: They told me the company had been asked to do more in Africa by its African-American employees, that GE wanted to develop good will in a region that soon could grow into a real market, and that knowledge gained from working in poor countries might pay off in unexpected ways for GE.

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