It's not easy being green!

It has been green week on the Today show, i haven't had a lot of time to watch it but basically they went to 4 corners of the earth to show how our environment is being damaged, how glaciers are melting and water is drying up. we did this to our planet, not the pioneers, think little house on the prarie, little general store for sugar and flour, not bringing their food from hundreds of miles away, no cars, water from the ground, no electronics or electricity, baths once a week. we have come a long long ways but what has the price been to our planet? i have never seen an inconvient truth and i don't like all the politics behind some of the "green" ideas but basically this is my thought process. i need to do some things to make things better and there a few things that are easy to follow that can improve our carbon footprint.

*Shorter showers, ironically it's the boys in my family that need to improve on this.

turn the water off when brushing teeth or shaving and using cold water in the washing machine when you can.

*Recycle!! i hate when i see glass bottles, cases of beer and a billion water bottles just thrown in a trash can, here in Hawaii at least, you get money for those and take care of waste in the mean time. caleb gets his play cash by recycling bottles and cans. matt saw so many bottles and cans going in the trash at work that he put out a bin and asked if anyone minded if his son got money for them, of course they didn't care.Caleb started it as a scout project and then we began to see how much goes in the trash that can be recycled. you can also recycle paper!

* use a reuseable water bottle. we use way too many water bottles that get left all over as waste. i love my insulated water bottle more anyway.

* the new thing is to not take a receipt if it asks you at ATM machines or gas stations, write it down in your check book, they say it will save acres of the rainforest by just not doing that one thing and by only taking one napkin at a restaurant.

*we can also be as paperless as possible, pay bills on line, saves stamps and paper.

*buy local, this helps to decrease our dependence on food from miles and miles away that have to be trucked, shipped and flown especially here to HI.

*use a reusable shopping bag, this is hard for me for groceries since there is so much at one time but i try to keep them in my car for small trips,  and the farmers market and i always re-use the plastic bags.

*turn off lights when not in use and unplug things like cel phone chargers they draw a lot of energy even when the phone is not attached. one woman got her electric bill down to like 75 cents or something by unplugging everything when not in use. also use the energy efficient light bulbs, this has been hard to get used to for their funky shape and i don't have them in every light fixture but most.

look for green labels and good things that companies are doing to help the environment like less packaging, selling little bottles of concetrated cleaning supplies and detergent instead of a large ready made product. walmart had a contest to see who could come up with the most environmentally improved product. hewlitt packard won. they reduced their packaging by 90% on thier laptops and it now comes in a laptop bag with padding and the instructions and it will be sold in stores for 700$ minus all the foam and cardboard. Yeah HP!

well that is my thoughts on being green, it's not hippie anymore to be a tree hugger, green is the new black! i think our children will get better at it than we are but we need to try and set a good example so that they will have a beautiful world to live in.

caleb has a shirt that says "POWER TO THE PLANET"  i agree! more power to ya!