One person alone doesn’t make much of a difference, really. But that’s no reason to throw your hands in the air, say “what does it matter,” and take a hot shower with water heated by a gas-burning tank. There are simple actions that you can take in your life, that don’t require turning into a scoldy, crunchy, hippie living in a yurt on a commune in Vermont. (Although there’s nothing wrong with that.)
In this episode, Mike and Greg are each other’s guests, and we go over things you can do both at home and in talking to your local and national government representatives to help restore carbon balance to nature.
Engineers are working the problems, too.
We are using new bumper music, “Happy Dance” by Mr. Smith. Legal notifications under the Creative Commons License.
I’ve thought of even more things that people can do without too much strees on your daily lives:
1. Re-use grocery bags as much as possible, and choose paper over plastic always (if you have forgotten your on bags.) Even if you need poop bags (those you can buy cheaply.) Use cloth bags, or bags made specifically for the purpose and sold by the grocery chain.
Some plastic bag companies advertise that the cloth bags require 500 more times as much water to manufacture than a plastic bag, but sea turtles don’t mistake cloth bags for sea jellies and choke. And have you ever seen a cloth bag stuck up in a tree after being blown by the wind. The point is not the water used, it’s that people don’t litter their cloth bags.
Paper bags from the grocery store can be used several times, and then for carrying out the recycling.
2. Don’t rake your leaves in autum. Set your mower to mulch. To me it never made much sense to remove fertilizer in the fall and then buy factory fertilizer in the spring. We spend too much money on chemicals that get into the water and float down to the Gulf of Mexico, causing red death from algae blooms. That being said, if you do rake leaves be sure to find where you can take them for composting. I do rake around my flower beds, I’ll be honest, and the nice big piles of black dirt at the composting yard are rich in nutrients. So I take the raw materials, the county composts them and then I get the dirt back. It’s win/win.
3. Cayenne pepper works better than ant killer in driving away ants. And it doesn’t kill insects you want to keep around. Eucalyptus oil is the smell that fleas do not like, so if you have cats, the collar only works so well when there are fleas in the carpet. Get rid of the fleas in the environment and your cat will be happier.
Feel free to add more suggestions!