I’ve enjoyed a recent exchange of emails with Jennifer Boulden, co-founder of Ideal Bite. Like LTT, Ideal Bite was founded on the belief that “if we all knew what we could do in the day to day to impact the planet and our communities in a positive way, we’d do it.” The idea of “guilting people into going green” or shocking them in action by grim reports of a climate catastrophe doesn’t seem particularly effective.

In that sense, Al Gore was preaching to the choir in “An Inconvenient Truth.” However necessary and affecting that film was, I wonder how many people walked out of the theater scared but largely unchanged. And how many people who should have seen it didn’t because of the loaded political associations?  As the Ideal Bite folks explain, “we don’t want someone to tell us what’s wrong…unless we understand how we can help.” That serves as the basis for Ideal Bite’s brand of “incremental environmentalism,” and the site offers “ideas for real people who lead busy lives and want to make small changes that up to big results.”

In a recent article published on the Huffington Post, Boulden proposed a more ambitious brand of green thinking. In “You Gotta Break A Few Eggs To Make An Omlette,” she writes about her experience at the Fortune Green Business Conference in Laguna Nigual, CA, reflecting on that “fine (nagging) line” that one treads when one chooses green products; “greener options are definitely better, but at the same time, they are only just less bad,” she writes. “The fact is we need a big, dramatic departure from the core structure of our economy. Why? Because it only works when we buy more and more things.”

Just when I was considering packing my bags for New Zealand to live a life of blissful ignorance, Van Jones spoke. Obama appointed this social change leader into a Green Collar Job position to make sure that the $20B - $40B allotment to stimulate green economic activity actually did just that, and that it the cash infusion benefited all of people in this country. His battle cry was, “Be Bold,” and I dig it.

I am no economist (even though I slogged my way through an Econ major at William & Mary), and I am no business pundit (although I hid from the economic downturn of 2001 by receiving a ‘green MBA’ from George Washington U). I am, however, someone who thinks that we need to rethink some core tenants under which we are surprisingly comfortable operating.

She continues,

Ask yourself, “why not be bold?” — and let me know what you come up with. Luckily I got my inspiration to fight the good-n-green fight for the next year from the conference. Not because anyone was spouting off warm-fuzzy platitudes that glossed over the abysmal state of the environment, but because I realized that we may just have the right ingredients for cooking up a new type of economy. Very intelligent, passionate people are shaping a new framework. Yes, there will be some short term costs and some temporary pain and discomfort. But remember, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.

Tomorrow, I’ll delve deeper into that question that we all seem to be wrestling with- are baby steps enough?

For more, check out Ideal Bite. For Boulden’s full article on HuffPo click here.