Ever since I saw the Green light, thanks to my friend Laurie David, and traded in my gas-guzzling SUV, I've tried my best to up my eco-awareness.

But after reading "Green Goes with Everything," Sloan Barnett's book about greening our homes and our lives, I decided to take a closer look at mine.

Yes, I had a pair of Priuses in the driveway (my girls call them "the Prii"), and the recycling bins are filled and dutifully rolled out to the curb once a week -- but I wanted a top-to-bottom assessment of things.

Because, these days, "green" means a lot more than making your house energy-efficient. It means making sure your house is a healthy place for you and your family.

So I arranged to have Deep Green Living, a terrific company founded by Susan Short, come to my house and do what is known as an eco-analysis of my home -- including my home office (a.k.a. HuffPost West). Sloan Barnett and a crew from NBC came over to record the process.

The Deep Green Living team went everywhere and looked at everything -- from the light bulbs in my bedroom to the cleaning products in my kitchen to the logs burning in my fireplace.

They gave me positive marks for some of the things I was already doing (using non-toxic cleaning products) and showed me a number of simple steps I could take right away toward creating a greener home and lifestyle.

And every step of the way, they helped remind me that going green is a process, not something that has to happen overnight. Every little bit helps, so don't think you have to be the second coming of Ed Begley Jr. to make a difference.

As President Obama said during his prime-time presser: "I'm a big believer in persistence."

Among the changes we made:

-- Replaced conventional light bulbs with energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, which use one-third the electricity and can last 10 times as long. As Matthew Morris from Deep Green pointed out, "If everyone in America replaced just one regular bulb with a CFL, it would be the equivalent of taking 1 million cars off the road." And we replaced the floor lamps next to my desk and on our editors' desks with lamps and CFL bulbs that throw off a cool white light as opposed to yellow, and reduce eye strain caused by prolonged reading and writing. At first, it was really strange, and I was ready to go back to my beloved yellow light. But I persevered -- and now I love them.

-- Installed power strips in the office and kitchen. Many appliances, including TVs, computers and phone chargers, still use electricity even when not turned on. Indeed, 5 percent of the electricity used in America is drawn by appliances that aren't powered up. For instance, the printer in my office uses 55 watts in standby mode, the copy machine uses 46 watts in standby, and the fax machine uses 10 watts in standby. Leaving these machines on overnight and when they are not in regular use can waste over 700 kilowatt hours a year (which is more than the average California household uses in a month). The easiest way to avoid this is to plug these appliances into a power strip that can quickly be turned off at the end of the day and back on in the morning.

-- Installed digital thermostats. Heating and cooling, on average, accounts for half of our homes' energy use. These thermostats allow us to consistently set the temperature at the most efficient levels. (According to Deep Green Living: "For every degree you raise or lower the temperature for eight hours, you'll save 1 percent on your heating or cooling bill.")

-- Replaced the wood logs in my fireplace with logs made of compressed coffee grounds. You get warmth . . . and a contact caffeine buzz. (OK, just kidding about the buzz, but the logs really do work.)

-- Started a composting jar in the kitchen. Making this change brought back many memories of my mother, who never liked to let anything go to waste. The uses she could find for a lemon rind!

-- Made the switch from a conventional dry cleaner using the eco-unfriendly perc process to a green dry-cleaning service that uses non-toxic alternatives.

The Deep Green team also reminded me and my family of some of the simple changes we can make in our daily habits that can have a big impact, including:

Being more aware of our water use by not leaving the water running when brushing our teeth or rinsing the dishes, taking shorter showers (that's really a tough one for me), and making sure we only run the dishwasher and washing machines when they have full loads.

Making sure to keep our cars' tires inflated to the right pressure (improves gas mileage by 3 percent) and that the air filters are clean (replacing a clogged air filter can improve mileage by as much as 10 percent).

And something really, really obvious: turning off the lights when we leave the room -- which I now do much more frequently because I finally understand how significant the cumulative energy savings can be.

Most of these changes were easy to make, and have been easy to maintain (although we still sometimes forget to turn off the power strips). Positive steps don't have to be painful.

Of course, there is a lot more that can be done to make my house -- and my lifestyle --even greener. But as I said before, going green is a process. And every little bit helps.

(Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.)

Recent Political Commentary

Obama Economic Team's Flawed Cosmology:
Still Believing Universe Revolves around Banks
Arianna Huffington

A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

First, these are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the country's financial crisis.

Second, they are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

My Wish List
Andy Rooney

In an idle moment, trying to come up with an idea, Humorist & Commentator Andy Rooney decided to make a list of things he should do but has not.

I Would Rather Stay Home & Not Travel
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney would like to mount a campaign once again to encourage people not to go anywhere as he was looking at all the ads in newspapers and magazines for places to go. Sometimes, travel is quite unpleasant.

I'm Hedging Today
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney sees the phrase "hedge fund" in the newspaper every day now and does not really know what a "hedge fund" is. A hedge fund has something to do with money. He was surprised to find "hedge fund" in one of only six dictionaries, but then read the definition.

On the Road to Buenos Aires
Even the United States can Manage Itself into Irrelevance
Chris Thomas

America has been the greatest of all nations for a long time. But we should not forget, especially at a crucial juncture like this, that with enough bad decisions and enough political incompetence, we can indeed manage ourselves into decline. Even we can become Argentina.

Larry Summers: Brilliant Mind, Toxic Ideas
by Arianna Huffington

According to most commentators, the president's press conference went a long way toward taking the spotlight off the roiling anger over AIG, bonuses and Wall Street abuses -- and putting it back where the president wants it: on the imperative need to pass his budget.

But the best laid plans of our remarkable president may be laid to waste by a bank rescue plan that is the product of exhausted ideas put together by men far too beholden to Wall Street.

To understand why a man as brilliant and accomplished as Summers can be so wrong about what to do with the banks and Wall Street, it would be useful to turn to "The Innovator's Dilemma," by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

What if Jon Stewart, Instead of John King,
Interviewed Dick Cheney
Arianna Huffington

Jon Stewart's Jim Cramer interview was a pivotal moment -- not just for Stewart, Cramer and CNBC, but also for journalism. Stewart kept popping into my head as I watched John King interview Dick Cheney three days later.

King opened the interview by showing clips of President Obama saying that his administration had "inherited an economic crisis" and "inherited a big mess." He then asked Cheney: "Did you leave him a mess?"

"I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances," responded Cheney. "It's a global financial problem. . . . So I think the notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration, that's interesting rhetoric but I don't think anybody really cares a lot about that."

Tim Geithner, CNBC &
The Second Coming of Known Unknowns
Arianna Huffington on Tim Geithner, Economic Crisis & Obama Budget

Besides being awash in toxic paper, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations, we seem to be drowning in unknowns.

Only, I get the sense that there are fewer unknowns than we're being told. Instead, we're greeted with a wall of manufactured complexity by the people whose job it is to make known unknowns into known knowns.

Rove Pontificating on Economy Like Madoff Pontificating on Investing

Although anointed as "the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party," Rush Limbaugh is just a massive shiny object that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, Karl Rove.

Time to Treat American Homeowners as Well as Wall Street Bankers
Arianna Huffington

"The banks are too big to fail" has been the mantra we've been hearing since September. But when you consider the millions of American homeowners facing foreclosure, aren't they also too big to be allowed to fail? So why hasn't the foreclosure crisis gotten the attention it deserves? A combination of perverse priorities and flawed thinking.

Bipartisanship vs What's Best for America:
President Obama Needs to Choose

The first question at President Obama's primetime press conference should have been: "Mr. President, what is your priority -- bipartisanship or what is best for America? And when the two are in conflict, which are you going to choose?

Although the answer should be obvious, the president's actions over the last couple of weeks have left many wondering.

America's Best Bet: Municipal Redemption Fund (MuRF)
Stopping Foreclosures & Protecting Investors

An original economic stimulus plan developed by a real estate agent in New Jersey that is currently in the hands of the House of Representatives and every Senator in Washington D.C. The Federal Government purchases NO interest in any private property and may take NO assignment of any lien under this plan. This plan is strictly a transparent "time-out" and "reset" of the national tax lien industry for the sake of stopping foreclosures while simultaneously protecting investors by shoring up the absolute bedrock of the capitalist economy which emanates directly from real property values and the taxes thereon.

Stimulus Package: If You Jump Halfway Across a Chasm, You Fall Into the Abyss
Arianna Huffington

Here's a thought: If we are going to spend $2 trillion trying to deal with the economic crisis, shouldn't we do it right? The price of getting it wrong is, after all, extremely high.

John Thain, Poster Child for Era of Irresponsibility
Arianna Huffington

There is plenty of debate about what President Obama's stimulus bill should look like -- as well there should be, given all that is at stake. But there is a growing consensus that the guiding principle in that debate should be Obama's call for a "new era of responsibility."

Helping fuel that consensus is the saga of the rise and fall of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, the poster child for the Era of Irresponsibility. The condemnation of his behavior is completely bipartisan.

Barack Obama Sober Sermon on the Steps
Arianna Huffington

The new president and the throng that turned out to cheer him and hear him on Inauguration Day were on two very different missions.

The crowd had come to celebrate. Obama had come to deliver a sober sermon.

Inaugural Address By President Barack Hussein Obama
President Obama's Inauguration Speech in text & video

President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address after taking the oath of office in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2009. The presidential inauguration is a tradition dating back to George Washington's 1789 inauguration. President Obama's Inauguration Speech in full in text & video.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism
Arianna Huffington

The collapse of Communism as a political system sounded the death knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while laissez-faire capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the polls, the ideology is still alive and kicking.

Does the Madoff Debacle Finally End the 'Who Could have Known' Era?
Arianna Huffington

An ambitious and risky undertaking carried out with hubris, and featuring the weeding out of anyone who raises alarms, little-to-no transparency, an oversight system in which no central authority is accountable, and the deliberate manufacturing of ambiguity and complexity so that when it all falls to pieces, the excuse who could have known can be used

Rewarding Those Who Got It Right
Arianna Huffington

Among its myriad failings, the Bush administration has repeatedly gotten it wrong when it comes to getting it right.

Over the last eight years, there has consistently been no penalty for those who have gotten things -- even the most important things -- wrong, and no reward for those who have gotten things right.

Call it Bush Darwinism: Survival of the Unfittest.

The Economic Meltdown Will Be Blogged
Politics Arianna Huffington

Losing your job -- or even fearing that you might -- can make you feel powerless. But at the same time you are looking for work -- or learning a new skill -- you can take up blogging. It doesn't require anyone's permission, there is no application process. You just need blogging software (some of the best is free) and the will to express yourself.