Software That Helps You Take Stock Of Your Impact On The Environment Eartaware Makes Ver Clear What You're Doing Right And Wrong

We may be trapped in the depths of winter, but April and Earth Day are just a couple of months away. Surely, you want to be prepared for the annual reckoning of humanity's impact on its host planet.

One way to take stock of what you are doing to - or for - the Earth is to use your computer to audit your activities at home, at the office and in between. This piece of magic can be accomplished with EarthAware, a software program published by Don Lotter, a doctoral candidate in ecology at the University of California at Davis.

EarthAware, which is available for both Mac and Windows (3.1 and 95), begins by asking you whether you live in a city, the burbs or out in the country and how many people live in your household.

It then takes you through six sections, focusing on your home energy and water use, your transportation habits, your involvement in environmental advocacy, and other topics.

In each section, you answer a long list of questions: What your monthly electricity use is; how much natural gas you consume; whether you have invested in energy-saving appliances; the weight of your daily trash output; how much composting you do; whether you track the environmental performance of the corporations in which you have purchased stock. In all, there are 116 queries.

Once you have finished the questionnaire, you get an in-depth analysis of your environmental impact, right down to graphs and charts that make very clear when you go right and where you go wrong.

EarthAware does not come right out and preach at you, nor is it heavy on recommendations for changing your lifestyle sufficiently to color you deep green.

But each of the program's six main divisions is peppered with environmental information. Moreover, many of the questions implicitly suggest ways you can do better by the environment. What conclusion would you come to when EarthAware asks you how much do you spend on solarizing your home, for example?

If, after completing EarthAware's probes, you feel you really, really want to do something about your environmental attitudes, you can take advantage of the program's World Wide Web links. They put you in touch with Internet sites containing environmentally related information about companies and their products, sites specializing in environmental education and sites listing additional resources for living an ecologically good life.