Making the changes necessary to protect the environment can seem an overwhelming chore. However, the reality is there are things we already do regularly, as part of daily routine, which can easily be made friendly to the environment.
Do you clean your apartment? Wash your dishes or clothes? Use toilet paper or tissues? I’m hoping the answer here is yes to at least some of these questions. If so, visit http://www.seventhgeneration.com/index.php and check out where you can get environmentally friendly detergent, dishwashing fluid, and paper products. All you have to do is enter your zip code and it will tell you where the nearest store is. The products aren’t very expensive and they are available at places like K-Mart, Target, and most supermarkets.
Making the switch is easy and it feels good to be doing the right thing.
I’ll probably be about 30,000 feet over Memphis when this posts, doing my part to hasten the onset of global climate change, right? Well, only sort of.
You see, I try to fly as rarely as possible, because I know air travel is one of the single most potent contributors to climate change. But when I do have to fly (it’s sort of an emergency this time), I pay a company called Climate Care that invests in projects that clean the environment.
Here’s how it works. They provide a handy calculator to determine how much extra carbon dioxide my trip is spewing into the atmosphere, and translate that into a dollar amount. (Actually, it’s pounds, but who’s counting?) The money supports projects around the world, doing an equal amount of repair to the climate as the damage I’m doing up there in the troposphere. I pay, and travel guilt-free.
The projects Climate Care supports are all over the world, “wherever More…
Use an electric blanket or mattress pad on your bed.
Plug in your bed!
This one comes to us from Jonathan in Boston, who’s too busy setting technology policy for MIT (and raising my niece and nephew) to write a silly little blog post. (For anyone who can find some time to write with us occasionally, click here!)
Many of the ideas on this blog focus on ways to minimize energy use, so pushing an electric blanket might seem a bit out of character — until you consider the savings to be had on the back side of this move, when you turn down the thermostat!
The truth is, I don’t know how well this equation works out. I’ve poked around on the Internets a bit and haven’t come up with too much on the difference between energy consumed by electric blankets and energy saved by lowering the home’s heat. My intuition tells me the blanket is probably a good idea, because you’re focusing a bit of heat More…
My brother’s favorite president is Grover Cleveland, because he ran for president as a bachelor but was secretly courting a 21-year-old college girl, whom he married shortly after taking office. He was 49 at the time.
Grover Cleveland…
A smooth operator.
William Henry Harrison was U.S. president for 30 days. He caught a cold while delivering a 2-hour-plus inaugural address without an overcoat on an extremely cold and windy day, and eventually died of pneumonia and pleurisy. His final words, according to Wikipedia, were “Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.”
Many of today’s current presidents don’t seem to understand the true principles of government. Or perhaps they understand, they’re just not carrying them out. If you want your president — or any elected leaders for that matter — to act responsibly and uphold principles of justice, tell them so! It’s Presidents’ Day in the United States. Why not send your president a card to mark this momentous event?
I interned in the U.S. senate many years ago, and we read and responded to every piece of constituent mail, no matter how cooky. And we took every bit of More…
I can’t tell you how many people have said to me in recent weeks that they know they should go to the doctor but they just haven’t gotten around to it, or they haven’t been to the dentist in, well, you know, five years.
My teeth, in paperweight form.
Click for a real close up.
Idiots.
Going to the doctor and dentist regularly will save you and me money and it could save your family and friends a heck of a lot of heartache.
I’ll give you my story first. It had been over two years since I’d seen a dentist when I finally got around to scheduling a checkup and cleaning last summer. Four fillings and two crowns later, I’m out 700 bucks, my insurance is maxed out at $3000 (over two calendar years), and I’ve wasted about seven Thursday afternoons getting shot up and drilled into. Plus, by maxing out my insurance, I’m doing my part to make sure rates stay high for everyone.
But that’s just teeth. The stuff going on inside your body can be hundreds of times worse. Cancers and other diseases seem to be crazy-common these days, and with a lot of this stuff, catching it early More…
Buy an energy-saver light bulb next time you’re at the drug store.
So you don’t need a light bulb. It’s okay, buy one anyway. Here’s why:
I’m switching out my old
bulbs as they blow.
“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.”
800,000 cars! That’s directly off a U.S. government Web site (here). And you know the U.S. government wouldn’t lie to you, right? Or stretch the truth? But anyway, a ton of very reputable organizations are saying the same thing, so this time I’m buying.
A wonderful Web site for people who want to live greener lives, Treehugger.com, explains it like this: Energy saving light bulbs cost a little bit more than the regular ones but only use about a quarter of the More…
My dad taught me something when I was about 10 or 12 that stuck with me, and he probably doesn’t even remember doing it. We got out of the car in the driveway one windy afternoon and he walked around in front of our house picking up all the bits of trash strewn about — a Dunkin Donuts cup, some dirty bits of newspaper, maybe a candy wrapper or something like that.
I must have walked right past trash in our yard thousands of times before that. I guess I just assumed it wasn’t my problem — that whatever was lying about in our yard would get blown on by the wind within a few minutes anyway.
That twenty second experience taught me something I’ve always remembered. There are some problems out there that affect us all, and More…
Buy fair trade chocolate & flowers for your sweetie.
Your honey-bunches-of-oats is going to cop a whole lot of gratitude when you pull out those Valentine’s Day proofs of your affection. You will have made his or her day.
Nothing says ‘I love you’
like goofy yellow tulips.
That’s awesome.
But with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can make hundreds of other people’s day at the same time!
You see there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the chocolate and flower businesses around the world. With chocolate, the main issues are child labor and worker exploitation — primarily in West Africa. As for flowers, the issue is weak labor laws in Colombia, which is the main supplier of flowers to the United States. Flower workers there are exposed to dangerous chemicals without any protective gear and they’re forced to work long hours at repetitive tasks that often cause painful carpal tunnel injuries. (Alexandra Early’s excellent article turns over all the dirt on Colombia’s flower industry.)
So what’s the alternative? Buy fair trade chocolate and fair trade flowers. For the flowers, check out Organic Bouquet online — they’re More…
There have to be a million reasons to use less energy. I’ll give you four.
Goodnight my banjo buddy.
#1, unless your landlord is picking up your electricity bill, it costs you money. A kilowatt/hour saved is a kilowatt/hour earned.
#2, the energy we use in our homes is generated at power plants far, far away, often using oil that comes from even farther. Americans like to talk nervously about “our dependence on foreign oil.” Less energy = less “dependence.”
#3, burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) pollutes the environment. The less energy we use, the less fossil fuel we burn, the less pollution spews into our skies — and lungs.
#4, and probably most important by far, is that burning fossil fuels to generate electricity releases carbon dioxide into the air, and carbon dioxide is causing climate change and all its very serious consequences. I’ll go more deeply into climate change in a future posting, I promise. For now let’s leave it at this: our kids will thank us profusely someday More…
chore. However, the reality is there are things we already do regularly, as part of daily routine, which can easily be made friendly to the environment.
My dad taught me something when I was about 10 or 12 that stuck with me, and he probably doesn’t even remember doing it. We got out of the car in the driveway one windy afternoon and he walked around in front of our house picking up all the bits of trash strewn about — a Dunkin Donuts cup, some dirty bits of newspaper, maybe a candy wrapper or something like that.
