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Don't sweat the details in filling out your carbon- or ecological-footprint questionnaire on those calculators you can find online.

It'll drive you crazy if you think about it too much. Just estimate and keep revising your estimates until you get an outcome you like.

It's like doing taxes, only without the threat of an audit.

If you really want to know how much you're robbing future generations, you need to examine your life more thoroughly.

Even then, well. . . .

I wake at 6 a.m. to enjoy the best few hours of a July day in Tucson.

I've upped the thermostat to 78 overnight and slept without a cover, but it's already uncomfortable inside. With a predicted high of 105, and some uncharacteristic humidity in the air, the AC will run all day.

I head for the bathroom. To flush or not to flush. Water is a threatened natural resource, as well as a big energy consumer. It takes pumps powered by fossil fuels to get it here.

In Tucson, more than half the domestic water supply comes from the Colorado River in an open canal that travels 330 miles through the desert — uphill — from an intake station at Lake Havasu. The rest comes from wells sunk deeply to mine prehistoric aquifers. Neither is a good choice. Both increase my carbon footprint by unknown amounts.

Power for the pumps is partially supplied by a coal-burning power plant in the northeast corner of the state that is blamed for poor visibility at Grand Canyon. I can't do anything about that, other than to use less water.

I don't flush and when I shower I'll step in before the water warms up (in this climate, it's not a sacrifice) and I'll step out moments later. My hair at summer length requires 15 seconds to wash.

The electricity that powers my air conditioning runs a central chiller at my condo complex. I have no meter and pay for the service in a lump-sum payment to my homeowners' association, regardless of how much electricity my wife and I use. I can't really control that, can't measure it for the carbon calculator.

This complex was built in 1960 of double-brick, uninsulated. It has window walls front and back, big panels of thick tempered glass with sliding glass doors. I could save a bundle on energy with double-paned, low E glass, but it would cost multiple bundles of money to do that. Did I mention that my power use is not metered?

In my unit, front and back means east and west. Not the best orientation for energy savings, but we have, at least, deep overhangs over the porches, 6 feet of shade that is doing no good at the moment as the sun peeks over the eastern mountains and sends shafts of blinding white light into the living room.

For now, I draw the blinds. Curtains would help.

In spring and fall, and for much of the winter, we leave the blinds open and warm the room with sunlight in the early morning. We open the sliding glass doors at night and close them in the morning when it's merely warm and not hot; reverse that when it's cool but not cold. In that way, we use neither heating nor cooling for more than half the year.

A well-built home in this climate can pretty much heat and cool itself on all but the most extreme days. If I ever build my own home, it will be well built. (I will never build my own home.)

On those infrequent, very cold days (where it might drop below freezing for an hour or two) we turn on the heat for a few hours, warming the house to sweater comfort. We turn it off overnight, using a down comforter on the bed.

This is not an altruistic choice. I hate overheated rooms. I grew up in New Jersey where all homes are hot and stuffy all winter.

In Tucson, summer is the problem. It will be hot today no matter how much clothing you don't wear.

Hot or not, I need my coffee in the morning. It comes today from Kenya and was roasted by Starbucks in the state of Washington, so it has traveled a bit farther than the average foodstuff on the American table — estimated in studies to be about 1,500 miles.

I don't feel too bad. Even the family of Barbara Kingsolver, whose recent book "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" recounts a year they spent growing much of their own food and buying the rest locally, admits to a coffee addiction. Of course, the Kingsolvers have found a fair-traded, ecologically appropriate supplier. I should do that.

I should do a lot of things the Kingsolvers do — move to Virginia, grow my own vegetables and raise turkeys. Write spectacular novels. But that's not happening either.

I brew a pot, in an automatic-drip coffeemaker that uses an incredible 1200 watts of power, but only for a short time. The coffee drips into an insulated vacuum pot and needs no hot plate to keep it warm.

Again, I have no idea how much electricity I'm using and saving, but we really try not to use too much despite the lack of economic incentive. We turn off lights when we're not in the room. We replaced our most used lights with compact fluorescent bulbs.

That has caused a problem at the dining table, where the ceiling fixture is on a dimmer. Turn it low, it buzzes; turn it up, it pretty much defeats the purpose.

Our condo is a modest 1,000 square feet. The wife and I, empty-nesters, have downsized. We used to heat and cool a much bigger space — not to mention irrigating parts of our half-acre of trees and plants and filling a backyard pool.

Here we have two pools, but they're available to us and 78 neighbors. The math is a little better. Likewise, the vegetation, though lusher than our mostly desert yard, is shared.

Still, the sprinklers on this hot morning seem to hiss some inconvenient truths: You're obscuring the Grand Canyon. You're using your grandchildren's resources. You're warming the planet.

I leave for work.

My wife, by the way, is out of town on business. Indiana today, New York tomorrow, flying home by way of Newark, N.J.

When I fill out those carbon calculators, air travel is our Achilles' heel. Driving less in a 4-cylinder car seems for naught when you're burning so much jet fuel.

The airlines spew 1.5 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions, but in the U.S., home of the Carbon Bigfoot, it's 3.5 percent according to the World Resources Institute.

In my wife's case, there is mitigation. When she is not traveling, she works right here, at a desk in the living room.

Her commute is a short walk in her slippers. Her work is transmitted via the Internet.

My commute is a little longer and I get there by automobile, alone.

I drive a compact recreational vehicle that I can coax into giving me 30 miles per gallon on the open road — when it's flat and I don't turn on the air conditioning, which hardly ever happens.

In town, I get about 24 mpg in my 1999 Honda CRV. My drive to work is seven miles. I have, in the past, commuted by bicycle, but that leaves me carless at work and I'm a reporter. Would you station a fireman at a bus stop?

Lunch is usually my most carbon-intensive meal. I drive to get there and I have no control over where my food comes from. Confession: I occasionally stop at McDonald's for a cheeseburger or two and a Coke.

I know. I know. I've read Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma." It takes seven calories of energy to produce one of the fairly worthless calories in my meal. Factory farming and feedlots use vast amounts of energy to fatten those cows and produce that rather tasteless patty and the fast-food meal's many additives — all variants of inedible corn and soybeans grown with megatons of petroleum-based fertilizer on industrial farms in the nation's heartland.

On this day, my son Zach meets me for lunch at a Mexican restaurant just two miles from the office. Most of the ingredients for his veggie burro and my chicken enchiladas in tomatillo sauce came, most likely, from California or Mexico. Parts of the meal are actually good for us.

The chicken, of course, came from some chicken factory and I don't even want to think about what I know about that.

Dinner tonight, even though the wife is out of town, will be an organic one. Some of her better qualities have transferred over to me in 27 years of marriage. (And she — vegetarian when we met — has succumbed to some of my lesser ones.)

I have a breast of chicken marinating in the fridge, an Energy Star fridge that saves unknown amounts of unmetered electricity.

This chicken is organic and free-range. What that means, according to Pollan, is that it, indeed, has been fed grain grown with natural fertilizers and free of pesticides. The chicken was, however, biologically engineered to grow this huge breast at a young age. And while it had access to a patch of grass outside the shed in which it was raised, it did not wander off its feeding tube to scratch around in the dirt and enjoy the sunshine. It traveled many miles in refrigerated trucks to get here, burning fuel all the way.

This simple meal of protein and greens is well-traveled, down to the condiments.

My marinade features soy sauce from China, Worcestershire sauce from England, garlic from California and a splash of white wine from God knows where. I use the cheapest wine for cooking and while the label tells me where it was bottled, the grapes came from a low bidder somewhere.

The salad of organic baby greens came from a field in California and the lemon I squeeze for the dressing, at this time of year, came from South America. The olive oil is from Italy, as is the Romano cheese I grind to finish it off.

I try to shop the farmers' markets for local produce. For one thing, the food is better, but there is a problem here in Tucson with buying local produce. As Gary Paul Nabhan pointed out in a recent essay, buying local produce doesn't necessarily make ecological sense in a climate where the water must be imported. He recommends buying only those crops that are indigenous to the area.

Nabhan, a naturalist, author and founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, has thought long and hard about this subject and has studied indigenous food systems during stints here, in Phoenix and in Flagstaff. He makes a lot of sense.

I just don't picture myself converting to a diet of chiles and tepary beans.

My beverage is a beer from Belgium, in a green glass bottle that I will recycle, though I retain doubts that it will ever be melted into another one. My newspaper, a few years back, exposed the fact that our recycling mounds of green and brown glass were being buried in landfills because they had no economic value.

Our local governments vowed to recycle them in the future, regardless of cost, but you know how things slip.

We're scrupulous recyclers at home. We separate our waste. We reuse containers. Drink filtered tap water instead of buying drinking water in bottles.

We prepare our own meals from unprocessed ingredients, most of the time. I do have this affinity for chicken potpies — not the gourmet variety, but those you buy on sale four for a dollar.

And while our commutes are short, our leisure travel is out of hand.

We flew to Utah this year for skiing, and to family weddings in Florida and Vancouver. We think nothing of driving a couple hundred miles on a weekend jaunt. This is Arizona, after all. The spaces between places are vast — though rapidly filling.

Basically, we have too many choices.

I haven't even gotten into a discussion of my workplace, where we buy ink by the barrel and newsprint by the ton. The ink is now soy-based, but it took oil to grow that soy crop in Iowa. We print on mostly recycled paper, but we're still cutting down carbon-sequestering trees and our product is delivered in a fleet of trucks and cars.

I haven't seen a paperboy on a bike in decades and none of our independent carriers, last time I checked the loading dock, were driving hybrids. The digital world will end that eventually, but for now I'm making my living off future generations.

It's enough to send me to the Web to buy some carbon offsets. I saw a site the other day offering 10 metric tons for $50 with the opportunity to save 10 percent on my first purchase.

I just can't figure out how that discount works.

It all makes my head hurt. Think I'll take a Bayer aspirin.

From Germany, I believe.