Enviro Girl lives in a town that hasn’t won any awards for being environmentally conscious, but she’s been reflecting a lot lately on the different aspects of where she lives that makes “green living” convenient and easy.
1. Curbside recycling. Heck, it’s even single-stream. Every other week all of Enviro Girl’s recyclable paper, metal, glass and plastic get taken away to be sorted and repurposed. Incredibly convenient! She only has to mess around with plastic bags, batteries and their ilk on her own time.
2. Freedom to hang–no covenants or rules declare clotheslines “unsightly” or otherwise illegal. Most of the homes in Enviro Girl’s town have clotheslines and people actually use them.
3. Sidewalks. Not in the country, but in the town center and adjacent subdivision sidewalks link the town together and provide a safe place for people to walk and/or wheel around on scooters, bicycles and skates. Children can walk safely from the video rental store to the city’s park without having to walk in the gutters or on mePrdians. Enviro Girl yearns for the day when a walking path stretches to the far edge of town where the elementary school is located, but that’s another post for another day.
4. Protected green spaces. Enviro Girl’s town adopted a Smart Growth plan years ago, designated land for various purposes to insure intelligent use of our resources–water, energy, soil. Smart Growth protects the wetlands behind Enviro Girl’s home from future development and forces prospective developers within the city limits where sewer and water lines already reach. Smart Growth lightens the burden on roads and emergency services and waste collectors. Smart Growth makes wise use of infrastructure already in place while protecting farmland, wildlife areas and green space for recreating.
5. The baseball and softball teams in her city’s Park & Rec Department reuse team t-shirts every year. A small and seemingly silly thing, but by requiring players to return their shirts after each season, no new shirts are required, minimizing the use of resources.
6. There is no fast food in Enviro Girl’s town–except for a Subway store inside of a gas station. Consequently, when people have to drive 15 minutes out of their way to grab a burger and fries to go, it’s a hassle. Enviro Girl believes that this lack of access helps everyone’s health.
That’s just a short list off the top of her head. Share with the Eco Women, reader. What makes your city/town/municipality “Green”?
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 
