I listed them, came back to this video after Earth day, thank you Sarah! 1. Plant a tree or garden (plant it yourself) 2. Read to a child 3. Take a walk and appreciate nature, if you are enjoying the planet you are probably going to be a lot better at taking care of it 4. Say a kind word to a friend or a stranger - more kindness and love generosity and compassion 5. Say no to an unneeded purchase 6. Turn off screens and go outside, you will have a different lived experience of you spend time outside 7. Use your local resources (parks, libraries) 8. Lobby your local school district for gardening classes or more recess time, fostering connection to the environment 9. Spay and neuter pets, or at least make sure they don’t have kittens or puppies. 10. Tell your loved ones I love you.
This is where the US is so different to life here in Australia. Our schools have gardens. My grandchildren go to one which also has chickens. Each classroom has a compost bin which students use for their lunch waste and goes into compost for the garden. They have a kitchen and cook food grown in the garden. They study the environment from preschool. My 3yo grandson attends an outdoor playgroup every week. And our kerbside waste collection requires we separate our waste: recycling for paper and plastic (including all those cardboard delivery boxes), glass, food and organic waste, and landfill. Our bins are audited for compliance! Kitchen and garden waste is commercially composted and sold to farmers and gardeners. Beverage containers have a deposit of 10c each and there are reverse vending machines to claim your refund. Our children have school libraries, community libraries, and classroom libraries. Funding for these is never threatened. Our children have a long recess in the morning and another long one at lunchtime. For half the year, sun hats are mandatory for outside play, so much time do they spend outside! Plus class activities are also taken outside when possible. Our parks, gardens and beaches are valued by our governments and communities - it is unthinkable we would need to fight for them! We regularly take part in tree planting and revegetation events run by government where thousands of trees and indigenous plants are planted by residents. We have community gardens. I am sad that things we take for granted are not the norm in the US 😮
This post is a breath of fresh air. Perfect metaphor for your very important ant apt message. Sarah, apparently you received messages from some members whose feathers were ruffled. (You said that, and it's another apt metaphor.) Think of it this way: some grains of sand irritated you and you produced a beautiful pearl. (Yet another nature metaphor.) Isn't it a valuable life lesson? The negatives, the downers, the feedback we don't want sometimes actually bears the sweetest fruit. You know what I'm going to say..... So Sarah, welcome the irritants, the naysayers. They make you stronger, more effective and stimulate your creativity to provide us with the best! 🌺🌲🔥⭐🐰🐕🦆🕷️🦋🍑🍏🍇🥑🍅
The one of the mantras of environmentalism is 'reduce, reuse, recycle', but there has been too much emphasis on 'reuse' and 'recycle'. 'Reduce' is the most important; reduce how much you buy, reduce the amount of packaging on what you buy, considering renting or borrowing instead of buying. If you buy less, you create less demand for it at the manufacturing end - THAT'S where the real benefit to the environment exists. And the less you buy, the less you have to reuse or recycle, the more energy saved all round.
