It’s Earth Day Today

It's Earth Day's 40th birthday today. How will you observe it?

Here are a few ideas.

Take time to appreciate the world around you. Walk or ride your bike to work if you can.

Be or become aware of your impact on the planet. As a first step, calculate your carbon footprint. There is a good calculator at the Nature Conservancy site: http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/

Then commit to a few easy actions to make your impact a little smaller. Here are two fun and easy ones posted at Yale’s Payne-Whitney Gym by Bulldog Sustainability:
The Briefly Nude Challenge: Save water (and time) by taking a quicker shower.

The Shake It Off Challenge: Minimize the paper towels you use by shaking off excess water before drying your hands. (Tip: 20 good shakes and you should only need 1 sheet!)
The EPA’s Earth Day site has more ideas: http://www.epa.gov/earthday/index.html And for those of you with more time, there is a great article “Ten Solutions for Climate Change” at the Scientific American site: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=10-solutions-for-climate-change&page=2

Re-Purpose or Recycle something. Perhaps you have some clothes you have outgrown or books you will never read again. Start with your local Goodwill and Salvation Army and ask your librarian where to make book donations. Every city has groups in need of gently used items. At http://www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org/content/publish/environment.shtml you can download a pdf with ideas for recycling and donating. This site may also help: http://www.earth911.com

Support a Cause. These links are to some of my favorite groups. There are so many more.
http://www.worldwildlife.org/climate/
http://www.repoweramerica.org/
http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/

Find a Way to Get Involved in Your Community. In many communities across the planet, there is a fun way to meet like-minded people and find out what is going on in your area. It’s called Green Drinks (see my post of January 10). If you go to this site you can determine if there is a group near you. http://www.greendrinks.org/USA/clist

Become informed. There are a number of informational links posted on this website. http://www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org/content/publish/environment.shtml 

Do something, anything. It is easy to feel overwhelmed, but you will feel better if you do something! Every action makes a difference. As Howard Dean used to say, "You have the power!”

Let me close with a tip my husband sent out yesterday:  You may have heard people say, "I don't need to recycle, I use so little." That may be true, but all the "Littles" add up to "Bigs." Say we, all 300 plus million of us in the US, individually waste one cent’s worth of our natural resources every day. That is equivalent to $3 million every day, or $1.095 billion dollars worth in a year.  EVERY LITTLE BIT HELPS, so please recycle.  It all adds up, fast.