National Car Free day

Walk, bike, run, skip! Try not to drive so often. Put on your walking shoes and enjoy the area around you. Walk to the nearest convenience store if you need something or spontaneously visit a friend who lives close by. You may rediscover the beauty of your own neighborhood again in the process!

Dryers Are Energy Vampires- Clotheslines Are Better

Hang dry your wet laundry. By doing so, you’re saving energy and preserving the fit and color of your clothes!

Just Say No to GMO

Buy organic heritage seedlings whenever you can. Most fruits and vegetables have an incredibly diverse range of varieties, but we typically only see one or two different kinds in the grocery store. By choosing to grow heritage plants we can preserve that diversity and give a big green thumbs down to monoculture.

More Ways to Avoid Plastic

• Jars. So many jars. For salads, soups, sauces, juice, opened packages of things. Justy jars. Lots of jars.
• Aluminum foil is a great stand-in for plastic wrap and can be easily recycled or saved for reuse.
• Wax paper is great for wrapping sandwiches. So are reusable sandwich pouches you can make or purchase. Many close with velcro and are easy to launder or wipe clean.
• Reuse empty yogurt, sour cream, or cream cheese containers. You’ve already got them and you have to wash them before tossing them into the recycling bin anyway, so you may as well use them again.
• Invest in reusable lunch containers like bento boxes or tiffins to avoid waste when sending off your little one (or yourself) with a bagged lunch.

Eat for the Environment

    Cutting back on meat consumption is good for the environment, your health, and your wallet. Producing one pound of beef puts as much carbon dioxide into the environment as driving a typical car 70 miles! Read “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the 2006 UN paper about the effects of the meat industry on the environment and human populations, at fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e00.HTM

Go Solar

    Solar ovens are inexpensive and easy to use, and you’ll cook for free every time you use one. Since it doesn’t require electricity, fossil fuels, or propane, a solar oven is perfect for your emergency supply kit. They also pasteurize water for drinking. Check out solarovens.org to see the great work this nonprofit is doing with solar ovens in developing countries. Go solar and really worship the sun.

Saving the Planet One Paper Towel at a Time

    Do you really need to use so many paper towels? One roll will last me at least one month at home. I have a whole shelf of well-used dish rags that started out their life as a nicely embroidered fabric and now are much more useful to me and the planet! Ditch the paper towels and facial tissues. Tea towels and dishcloths work pretty much everywhere you’d use a paper towel, and you can employ newspaper for the truly gnarly messes. As for facial tissue, toilet tissue works just as well at a fraction of the cost and without separate packaging. Why buy something twice?

Every Drop of Water Counts

    We take water so for granted. We leave the faucet running when we brush our teeth, over-water our gardens, wash the car too often, take baths every evening rather than a quick shower, or don’t mend that dripping tap. Become water-wise. At this writing, my landlord has not responded to my messages about the kitchen faucet dripping. So I have a bucket capturing it all in the sink and I use that to water my backyard. I always have a bucket in the bathtub to capture shower water and haul it out to water my front and backyard. I used to get really strange looks from neighbors but they are used to me now. A couple down the block started doing the same after we met at an afternoon block party!