Mother Ocean Day

    Look into volunteering to clean up your local beach. With pollution in our water and in the sand, help make these local hot spots safer for visitors to the beach and the environment! If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out All One Ocean to see when you can help: alloneocean.org/community-meeting-beach-clean-up.

Hydrated and Saving the Planet

    Give up the bottled water. Please? Not only is it ridiculously priced and horrifically wasteful, but also it fails to offer any benefit over tap water. Many brands draw their water from a municipal supply- as in, the same water that comes out of your tap for free. Additionally, bottled water companies aren’t held to the same stringent standards as public waterworks. And, adding final insult to injury, plastic bottles can often leach harmful chemicals into the water and then languish in landfills for thousands of years if not properly recycled. It’s better for everyone involved if you carry a jar or reusable water bottle to fill up instead. Drinking from a Mason jar is the ultimate in chic, too!

Making the Most of a Rainy Day

Get a rain barrel:

• Install the rain barrel at least six feet from your house. Locating it near an area you’ll be watering the most makes for convenient use later
• Ensure that your rain barrel has an overflow at least as large as your inflow-for example, if you have rigged it so that water is collected directly from your eaves’ trough downspout, your overflow valve should be as large as your downspout as well. This will allow your rain barrel to get rid of excess water as fast as it collects it, which might be necessary if you live in a city with crazy, unpredictable weather like my brother does.
• If you are using the rain barrel to water your garden, consider using a soaker hose. You can attach the hose to the rain barrel and then run it through your garden so that it covers the area you’d like. Now, every time you see a rain cloud, you’ll get really excited!

Let’s Not Contribute to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

I don’t know about you, but photos of the big patch of plastic and garbage floating in the ocean scares me more than almost anything else. Nearly 90% of plastic bottles are not recycled, instead taking thousands of years to decompose. If you are used to toting around your green tea, juice, or iced coffee in plastic, get a cool-looking thermos instead. This is a great choice for the environment, your wallet, and possibly your health. You can guzzle as much as you want and still be green.

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!