Do you ever stop to think about the water you drink and use every day?
World Water Day is tomorrow, Thursday, March 22. Started in 1993 by the United Nations, World Water Day focuses attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.
Water is probably something you don’t give a lot of thought to on a daily basis…
Recycla has talked about toilet paper before, but it bears repeating: Buying conventional TP made from virgin fibers is a terrible idea. This is an eco sin reserved almost exclusively for Americans, where most toilet paper is not made from any recycled content and, in fact, far too much of it is coming from old-growth forests.
Posted in 3 Rs, green around the world, issues
Take a moment and look outside. How many different types of plants, fungi, insects, animals and birds can you identify? Continue reading
A wetland is classified as any low-lying land that is flooded for at least a portion of a calendar year. Swamps, bogs, marshes and fens all fall into this category. An acre of wetland can store up to 1 to 1.5 million gallons of water. Enviro Girl thinks that’s astonishing–if we would just leave wetlands alone, we’d have no need for retention ponds in most cases. Wetlands also filter and purify water flowing into streams, lakes, rivers and oceans and they provide habitat for an amazing array of creature and plant life–everything from reptiles to insects, fungi to ferns. Without wetlands, water sources would be more polluted and flooding becomes a problem. In short, wetlands provide many services and resources, but they’re under-appreciated. Continue reading
Everyone starts a new year with plans to improve–lose weight, save money, take a risk, accomplish a goal. Enviro Girl thinks everyone should start the new year with an Eco-resolution, one small thing they can do to improve the environment. The small things add up, as illustrated in this recent post over at Fake Plastic Fish. Here are some free, incredibly convenient and easy Eco-resolutions for you and your friends to try:
Enviro Girl is a HUGE fan of shopping at locally owned and operated businesses. From restaurants to florists to film developers to groceries, if it’s owned by Mom and Pop, you’ll find her spending her money there. In fact, she goes out of her way to avoid shopping at “Big Box” and franchise stores. She’ll go years without shopping at the local mall and tries her very best to spend her money at the stores on “Main Street.” Her reasons are environmental, political and economical — here’s the breakdown of why she shops local: Continue reading
Posted in eco holidays, issues, transportation, websites & blogs
Tagged 3/50 Project, buy Christmas local, environmental benefits of shopping local, local businesses help local economies, locally owned businesses benefit communities, reasons to shop local, reasons to support local businesses, shop local, stop urban sprawl, the environmental and economic benefits of shopping local
Nothing, not even a week in Italy with George Clooney, could induce Enviro Girl to go shopping on Black Friday. The last predictions she read indicated 77 million people planned to shop that day, mostly with plans to buy stuff for themselves. Consumption and consumerism has shaded most people’s Christmas season. There’s no escaping the message from the advertisements: buying stuff will make us all happier. The reality is that going on a spending frenzy at the mall has absolutely zilch to do with joy or peace on earth.
Coming Soon: October 16 is Blog Action Day, and this year’s topic is FOOD! What a great topic! On that day, bloggers will cover topics including sustainable food production, the availability of food, the cost of food, creative ways to serve food, malnutrition, hunger, becoming vegetarian and favorite foods. As an omnivore, Enviro Girl can’t wait for October 16th!
Speaking of food, Enviro Girl read an interesting piece the other day: How That Food You Throw Out Is Linked to Global Warming. Wasting food resources has significant environmental impact, but people often don’t think about it. The energy spent on food production and transportation could be reduced if we reduced the 55 million tons of food we throw away. Enviro Girl has read other staggering statistics on food waste–and she’s been guilty of throwing away food at her house too. It’s a common thing to find gross stuff in refrigerators, but tossing out a bag of food each month is a waste of money and many other resources as the article explains.
Waste aside, Enviro Girl began really examining her family’s shopping and food consumption habits about two years ago. It bugged her to literally throw out money from her fridge every month. How could she fix this problem? Here are three of the things she did to reduce her family’s food waste:
1. Meal planning. Instead of randomly shopping for food each week, Enviro Girl started writing a list of what she planned to make for meals ahead of her weekly trip to the grocery store. AFTER taking inventory of the necessary ingredients, Enviro Girl would shop for what she needed. By planning meals a week in advance, Enviro Girl saved time, money and threw out less wasted food. This also resulted in less stress–instead of asking “what’s for dinner?” at 5:00 each evening, her family knew chicken casserole was on the menu and every part of the meal was assembled beforehand for fast preparation without any missing ingredients causing delays.
2. Eating down the pantry. Once every few months Enviro Girl skips her weekly shopping trip and makes meals out of what she finds in her pantry, fridge and freezer. This forces her family to eat the frozen half of a lasagna they’ve saved before it succumbs to freezer burn. This keeps Enviro Girl from stockpiling ingredients for meals she didn’t get around to making. By managing her family’s resources by hoarding almost no food, Enviro Girl never throws out bottles of ketchup that expired in 1998 or cans of soup that should’ve been sold in 2002.*
3. Buying less. Sure, there are 5 people in Enviro Girl’s family, but that doesn’t mean she needs to buy 5 pears or 5 oranges. (She’s not sure why she kept doing this for so long, but one way she figured out her family’s consumption habits was by buying less to see what they actually ran short of and what they never really ate.) Enviro Girl began buying less perishable food more often. This meant the food she bought actually got eaten before it became rotten and turned to mush in her produce drawer. Buying less perishable food means throwing out less rotten food.
* Bonus tip: Every time there’s a food drive, Enviro Girl donates every unopened can/box/jar of food she can find in her pantry. This insures that nothing remains beyond its expiration date and when there’s less clutter, Enviro Girl can take better inventory of what her family really needs.
Years ago Enviro Girl lived in town and on a hot spring evening she was trying to grade a stack of papers for her English students. She had the windows open to catch the breeze. She was also catching the boisterous noise of a house party a few doors down the street. The stereo blasted, kids shouted and try as she might, Enviro Girl could not concentrate. It was 10 on a week night and Enviro Girl felt like she should have to right to keep her windows open and work in relative quiet. After another half hour of sputtering her irritation, she called the local police department to inquire about a city noise ordinance. The dispatcher assured her that the noise ordinance was in effect for over an hour now, so Enviro Girl filed a complaint about the party. About fifteen minutes later the police busted an underage beer party and Enviro Girl was able to finish grading her papers in relative peace and quiet.
Noise pollution–it’s everywhere, wrecking the quality of life. The effects range from irreparable hearing loss to increased stress levels and disrupted sleep patterns. Noise pollution causes environmental damage as well. In the ocean, many dolphins and whales cannot communicate with each other because of all the racket from ships and sonar blasts. Noise pollution in our seas creates havoc for migrating fish and is considered to be a major cause of beached whales. Frogs, birds, insects and bats cannot compete with noise pollution, resulting in depleted populations. Noise pollution means animals and birds cannot hear their mates, cannot warn of danger and cannot hear predators. The effects of noise pollution on wildlife are similar to the effects of noise pollution in humans, including raised blood pressure, low body weight and hearing loss. Noise pollution can mess up migration patterns, disrupt food supplies and destroy nesting habitats.
While these effects are expected in urban areas, human encroachment is destructive even in “protected areas” like state and national parks. In Zion National Park, most of which was designated as wilderness in 2009, visitation doubled between 1982 and 1997 to more than 2.6 million visitors per year, most of whom lined up to drive through the park’s famous canyon. In 2000, however, the park banned vehicles during the its busiest times and created a mandatory shuttle system. The ban has improved the area’s sound quality for visitors and wildlife in the wilderness and non-wilderness portions of the park. Before the ban, several wildlife species had moved further and further from the main roads to avoid the sound of vehicles. Today, visitors have reported seeing mountain lions from the shuttle buses.
What can Eco Warriors do to combat this form of pollution? The obvious answer is to quiet down. Restrict your use of motorized vehicles and appliances, turn down your stereos and television sets, participate in “silent sports” and employ manual tools for outdoor and indoor work. Enviro Girl uses a rake and broom instead of a leaf blower. She uses a broom instead of a vacuum for daily cleaning. She rides a bicycle and cross-country skis instead of motorboating or riding a snowmobile. Trees help muffle sound, and Enviro Girl has planted many. When you reduce the distance your food and other goods travel, you reduce noise pollution.
You can also support policies that control noise pollution. You can call in violations of noise ordinances (like Enviro Girl did on that night long ago) or get involved at the state and local level by supporting quiet public spaces, like advocating for bans on motorized vehicles on park & recreation trails.
To learn more about noise pollution and what you can do to muffle the chatter, check out these links: Shhh! 10 Ways to Quiet Noisy National Parks and The Quiet Use Coalition.
Like most eco-warriors, Enviro Girl recycles, picks up other people’s litter, avoids flushing harmful chemicals down the drain and tries to reduce her emissions by sharing rides and consolidating her driving errands. She’s aware of pollution in all of its forms, even pollution most people don’t think about: light pollution.
If you step outside at night, can you see the stars in the sky? If you can’t easily pick out the Big Dipper, it’s due to light pollution. It’s true–too much light is an environmental hazard, causing problems beyond making urban stargazing a difficult hobby.
Light pollution is simply too much light at night, usually unnecessary light or wasted light, that disrupts the habitat of all kinds of creatures. Why is too much light at night a problem?
For starters, it’s often a waste of energy. What’s the point in completely illuminating an entire area reaching up to the clouds? Sure, some night lighting is essential for safety reasons, but much of the light we create at night serves no useful purpose. Enviro Girl has several outdoor light fixtures at her house, but she only turns them on as they’re needed, not every night. And inside her entire house, only one windowless bathroom has a small nightlight that turns on when the room grows dark–all of the other lights go off at night.
Energy use aside, too much light at night disrupts human sleep patterns because light is part of the biological prodding that wakes us up just as darkness helps us sleep. Light at night messes up migrating birds, feeding patterns of nocturnal creatures and insect breeding. Take a firefly for example. A firefly finds a mate by flashing at night–when there’s too much light, there’s no way a firefly can find a mate. Many firefly populations have disappeared because they’ve no safe place to live. Nocturnal mammals rely on darkness for cover–when everything is bright at night, they become easy prey and their numbers diminish. Nesting sea turtles rely on the cover at night to lay their eggs–but the bright artificial lights on many beaches confuse the turtles, who now cannot find a safe spot to nest. According to National Geographic, this results in hundreds of thousands of lost hatchlings a year--just in Florida! It’s easy for Enviro Girl to pull a shade and restore darkness so she can sleep at night, but the animals, birds, insects and fish do not have this capability.
Light pollution makes the night sky impossible to see in many parts of the world, it also makes it impossible to study. The constant haze of light separates people from amazing views of the night sky just as much as noise pollution can separate people from the sounds of nature.
What’s both frustrating and encouraging about light pollution is that it’s an easy problem to fix. By redesigning light fixtures, we can save energy, preserve our view of the night sky and reduce disrupting nature. The worst kinds of night light include globe lights, billboards, under-lit signs, wall-mounted non-directional fixtures and mercury vapor lights (commonly known as “barn lights”). A small detail like designing night lighting to light from above to below instead of from below to above makes all the difference. Check out these two images:
See how the “globe” fixture lights up the road–not only are there TOO MANY lights illuminating the area (Enviro Girl is hard-pressed to find any value in making it look like broad daylight 24/7), half of the light produced goes into the night sky, serving no discernible purpose.
This image shows a well-lit sidewalk. Almost all of the light produced is targeted to a specific area and very little is escaping into the night sky. The area is safe without much light reflecting above or beyond where it’s needed.
Enviro Girl appreciates the need for some night lighting to keep people safe, but most of the night lighting she encounters is purely for cosmetic or commercial purposes. She’s happy to do her part by keeping her neck of the woods dark and welcomes nocturnal creatures who need darkness to survive. By keeping her lights off at night, bats, owls, rabbits, mice, toads, frogs, raccoons, foxes, skunks, coyotes and yes, even those wonderful fireflies can survive. She also saves on her electric bill, reduces her carbon footprint and preserves the incredible view of the starry sky.
Enviro Girl encourages you to do nature a favor and examine your use of night lighting. Can you help reduce light pollution?
Posted in 3 Rs, electronics, green around the world, issues
Tagged causes of light pollution, how to fix light pollution, light pollution, light pollution and environmental problems, light pollution and habitat dirsuption, light pollution and night lighting, reduce energy use, reduce night light, reduce night lighting, reduce waste, what is light pollution
