Earth Day is Here!

As people all over the country gear up for Earth Day celebrations, it’s a good time to reflect on our impact on the planet. While we may feel an insignificant part of the whole picture, we make it up in volume. For instance, each person turning off lights in rooms not being used times leventy billion people equals a lot of kilowatt hours saved! Same with water, same with plastic bag litter. Think in terms of the multiplicative effect of many people taking the same actions. Some of the things we can do to get started:

Stop buying bottled water. Sure, you recycle your bottles, but overall, we disposed of 70 million plastic water bottles daily. Fewer than 15% are recycled, and the water isn’t usually of any higher quality than tap water. If you really want to be green, drink tap water from metal reusable bottles. If that’s not possible where you are, refill the plastic one and use it as many times as you can before you recycle it.

Visit http://globalfootprint.org and take the quiz to discover how you are impacting the environment. It’s sobering. http://www.earthday.net/Footprint/info.asp When I took the quiz, it really raised my awareness of how much we consume, compared to the average person on this planet. When, at the end of the quiz, I clicked on what I can do, it took me to this link: http://ww2.earthday.net/plasticbags and guess what: we can quit using plastic bags. (My point exactly!)

So how are you going to get started eliminating plastic bags from your life:
Got through all your drawers and closets and pull out all those canvas tote bags you’ve gotten from conferences over the years. Stuff them all into one and put them in your car; hang a few on a hook by the back door for when you walk to errand. (You DO walk to some errands, don’t you?)

Then ANYTIME you are going to a store of any kind (and yes, that certainly includes Wal-Mart), take your bags in with you. It takes about 3 months to make it an unconscious habit, but YOU CAN DO IT!

There isn’t time to put this off. Visiting environmental websites gives us countless ways we can reduce our impact on this planet, but it has to be a conscious choice, and it requires some effort. So far, we don’t have another planet to move to when this one is trashed. With the technologic and financial resources we have, the impact of our actions will take a while to catch up with us, but it is already catching up with the billions of people on this planet our actions impact. Tropical islands now underwater from rising sea levels, pollution in crowded slums, lack of clean drinking water, drought and crop failures. It’s scary, and it’s happening.