Prejudiced against people who can’t drink milk?

Like to make fun of folks who post notes asking folks not to burn incense?

Tired of whiners whining about your love for perfume?

I once was, too.

Growing up in an American Buddhist community, I was used to folks with dietary restrictions and Rice Dream back before there was an environmental movement, per se. Before there was Whole Foods, or Michael Pollan books atop the bestseller lists.

I was young, seemingly invincible (I once ate an entire dozen Dunkin’ Doughnuts, just to prove a point; and every day ate “seven meals”—two heaping plates of breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus two over-healthy servings at snack time). I worked as a lumberjack for the better part of a year, I played basketball and smoked Shermans and drank too much and was, generally, a big wild silly dumb kid.

But now, in my thirties, and having learned a bit about how bad conventional food is getting (Michael Pollan: “food has changed more in the past 50 years than in the prior 10,000″*); having learned that walking down a conventional candle aisle is worse than smoking a couple cigarettes, there’s so many toxins (fancy word for poison) in the air; having learned that perfume is made in laboratories and milk is full of hormones…I’m no longer intolerant of the sensitive among us.

In fact, I’m one of them.

Recently I was out of town, at a family dinner, and was shocked at the lack of care mothers invest in what their children put in their mouths; I was shocked at the factory farmed crap that men stuffed in their fattened mouths; and I was grateful to return to Boulder, the “fittest city in the US.”

Still, here, it’s easy to be unhealthy—our state is the least obese in the nation, at only 19.7 percent, but only 20 years ago, back when I was a young silly wild invincible young man, 19.7 percent obese would have made us the fattest in the nation. Everyone gets their food and coffee in togo containers we then throw away five minutes or five hours later—our responsibility is still out-of-sight, out-of-mind. That said, 300 days of sunshine a year has a way of encouraging folks to get outside, to bike or climb. And getting outside has a way of making people fall in love with the Great Outdoors. And love sounds the death knell for ignorance.

We’re fast forwarding in real time: change isn’t hard to see, you only have to sit back and watch us decimate our environ, and ourselves.

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The Thinnest State in the US in 2010 would have been the fattest State in the US only 20 years ago.