Enviro-Account.

• Author: Durning, Alan Thein
• Position: Computer program - Evaluation

You're as green as your friends, maybe greener. You carry a canvas shopping bag. Funny-looking light bulbs stick out of your fixtures. And last year, when you discovered you had left the iron on for a week while on vacation, you were haunted by images of your grandchildren damned to the inferno of global warming.

So what do you have to learn about walking softly on the Earth?

Quite a bit, thinks entrepreneur Don Lotter. And he's got $30,000 of credit card debt riding on whether you will pay him to teach you.

Lotter may be no genius at personal finance, but he knows his stuff when it comes to earthly affairs. His EnviroAccount computer program will tell you exactly how much your lifestyle hurts - or helps - Mother Nature. It will tell you what to change. And it will track your progress over the years.

Drive too much? Penalty points. Shop at yard sales? Extra credit. Toss paint thinner in the dumpster? Big booby prizes. Invest in "clean" businesses? Bonus points. Add it all up, and you've got a green score that you can watch over time and compare with friends' scores.

Lotter is not our typical entrepreneur. At 40, he's still in grad school, inching toward a Ph.D. in ecology that he started "about a decade ago" and living on a student's budget. Even the origins of his brainchild are somewhat unorthodox.

"I teach a course on Western forms of environmental consciousness," Lotter reports. "Three years ago, I realized that the way we're linked to the biosphere is invisible. We can't look around and see it. It's mostly through our consumption.

That's probably the main reason we run roughshod over the environment, Lotter concluded, theorizing that if there were a way to make personal impacts tangible, raising environmental consciousness would be much simpler. Lotter dreamed of ecological bookkeeping, software that would let people watch their impact the way they watch their weight, a sort of calorie counter for environmental enthusiasts.

Lotter poked around for a means of personal environmental accounting, but his search of thousands of software programs uncovered nothing useful. So he decided to create his own. "I thought it was going to be a six-month project," says Lotter.

Three years later, EnviroAccount was finished. Environmental accounting, it turned out, was confoundedly difficult, requiring a battery of 120 questions, some of them stumpers: What share by weight of the manufactured goods you have purchased new in the last 10 years are...