Category: sustainable

America Recycles Day

Recycle More!
Recycle More!

Garbage is a terrible thing to waste!

On America Recycles Day, what commitment can you make to recycle more?  I live in a community where my one-sort recycle bin is picked up bi-weekly and compost every week.  It is easy!!  However, every community has their own rules on recycling and composting. Find recycling information for your community  http://earth911.com/

It is a horrible to waste valuable resources by putting recyclables in the landfill where they might sit for hundreds of years(We don’t know how long plastic will last, maybe forever in tiny pieces!)

http://earth911.com/  has a great article on the mistakes we make in recycling. Read it here

Some ideas to help you recycle more:

  1. Bottle caps should stay on bottles.
  2. Magazines and glossy paper can be recycled!
  3. Shredded paper is hard to recycle, it flies around.  Compost shredded paper.
  4. Food stained cardboard(pizza boxes) should not be recycled.  Again, they can be composted along with paper egg cartons.
  5. Do not put plastic bags in your compost bin.  They jam the machines!  Bring all plastic bags back to the grocery store for recycling, and reuse them over and over before you recycle them.
  6. Choose glass or aluminum over plastic.  Glass and aluminum are easier to recycle.
  7. More ideas
  8. Get into the recycle mindset
  9. Good Luck!

 

 

 

Be Kind!

14713578_1503958696281770_4010382933354455936_nA few weeks ago I wrote how stressful the American election was for everyone. The post-election has been even more stressful. The surprise results, disrespect for diversity, uncertainty and anger have been difficult for my circle of people. Today is World Kindness Day which makes me think of my late mother. She was a role model for being kind in everything she did.

Change and uncertainty are scary. We have lost control of our futures and the future of our earth.  With all the verbal garbage of the past year no one has a vision of what the future holds. Today as I read the conservative views in the newspaper, I felt they were uncertain and scared also.

We love the diversity of our choices
We love the diversity of our choices

Diversity is so important whether you are talking about people, ideas, plants, foods, wildlife, everything. Mono-cultures can’t survive. They are not sustainable. Does anyone want to live in a world where only one kind of plant or tree grows? A world where we eat only one food? What if every dog was exactly the same? What if everyone thought exactly the same, and golf was the only sport to play? How boring!! I know this is silly, but it is diversity that makes life interesting. Diversity makes our freedoms and choices important, we are not all alike.

The uncertainty will not go away, but we can all be more kind. This week I plan to smile more, criticize less, listen better, and appreciate the diversity of our human family and diversity of our earth, and ….

14980809_10211460341603279_1791260813380623928_nWe will all be happier.

Veteran’s Day 2016

20161111_160745I believe in peace and non-violence.  The veterans I have known are awesome. The sacrifice of time and lives is more one can imagine. I have gratitude for what all the veterans of the world have sacrificed for our freedoms and hopes for a better world.
In Canada it is Remembrance Day. This is a post from an amazing college freshman, Sherina Harris.  Read her here.

My biggest problem with some of our elected officials is they do not understand the implications of their actions. They don’t respect the lives and families of those in our military when they send them into combat. Leadership, Compromise, negotiations, and PEACE wins the day for me.

Below is from a Startribune.com newsletter by Patrick Coolican:

Veterans Day. A letter home from Sgt. Michael A. DiRaimondo, 22, of Simi Valley, Calif.:

Thursday, Sept. 4, 2003: Life is so precious. Living day by day in good health or just happiness is probably what makes me happy right now. I try not to think that what I do makes me happy. Just being alive, having a wonderful family, good friends, watching the sunrise morning after morning that’s what makes me feel good. I think people take their lives for granted. Some just haven’t hit that part of their lives where they stop and say, “I am such a lucky person to have the life that I have.”

DiRaimondo, who planned to be a paramedic firefighter, was killed on Jan. 8, 2004, when his helicopter was shot down while on a medical evacuation mission near Fallujah.

bird-62696_640“Keep them in your thoughts and learn about America’s current and potential conflicts. In a democracy, ultimately it’s the citizens who make decisions about war.” Patrick Coolican

Protecting our Waterways

Keep our lakes and rivers clean
Keep our lakes and rivers clean

The leaves are falling, and it is raking season.  What does this have to do with water quality?

The substances that turn our lakes and rivers green each summer come from our lawns and yards. We think of leaves as waste, but to a lake they are food. The algae in lakes love leaves, and when we feed lakes too many leaves, algal blooms turn our lakes and rivers green and smelly. Protecting water is everyone’s job What can you do? Simple–remember the land/water connection! What we do to the land we do to the water. Clean your streets when the leaves fall from the trees, and when you mow the grass clean your streets, also. Keep our lakes and rivers clean.

A Brew of Spiders

“Once you begin watching spiders, you haven’t time for much else.”  ― E.B. White

By Patrick Edwin Moran - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20787919
By Patrick Edwin Moran – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20787919

I have a love-hate relationship with spiders. They are a mess to pick up after, leaving droppings on my floors and the outside of my house. They build webs in every corner and under chairs and furniture. And Spiders are scary.

BUT

They do so much good for the earth and are one of the most interesting living things on our planet.  Spiders eat more insects than birds and bats combined, and they are valuable food source for birds and bats. Hummingbirds use spiderweb material to build their nests. The most fascinating thing about spiders are those incredible webs, and famous stories in literature are Charlotte’s Web and Arachne. Some spiders build a new nest every day, and in Ukraine Christmas spiders are good luck. Factretriever.com has put together 83 amazing facts about spiders.  Read them here.

Have a Happy Halloween!

A Love Note To the USA From Canada

https://sherinaspeaks.wordpress.com/author/sherinaharris/

“The moral of the story is this: be kind to people, and encourage kindness when you see it. After the horrible, hurtful things that have been said in this election cycle, we absolutely need more empathy and compassion in this world—no matter what our nationality is.” Sherina Harrris

Sherina is a gifted freshman in college.  Her blog site is above

My Take On Regulations

Do we want lakes that look like this?
Do we want lakes that look like this?

“I’m going to slash government regulations!”  Candidates for office

Who is their audience for this absurdity?

This is my simple take on a very complex issue.

999922_619252368141411_1083645899_n (1)Many candidates for office talk about cutting regulations.  What are they talking about?  Why doesn’t the media ask them what regulations they want to cut? One presidential candidate wants to cut food regulations?  Cut the Food and Drug Administration rules that govern food production, cleanliness, food packaging and temperature? Ridiculous!

Do we really want less regulation on financial institutions? What have we learned from Wells Fargo? Should we allow banks to cheat their customers like Wells Fargo did?  I had a problem with U.S. Bank selling my credit card number to a health club. It took months to get my money back after unauthorized charges were placed on my credit card. Banks need to be regulated!

David Brooks has said, that capitalism without  a moral compass is a failure.  As evidenced by this presidential race, we have lost our moral compass.  Capitalism/for-profit businesses should NOT be deciding what standards they want to follow. Does it work to let corporations set their own rules about polluting our water and dirting up our air when profit is a top priority? What do you think?

Regulations and standards are to keep the public safe.  Sometimes rules seem extreme, but they keep us safer regulating our workplaces, food, many products, and other necessary things.

Self regulation does not work.  Farmers in the United States were given a pass in the Clean Water Act.  They think they can regulate themselves.  Is that why the corn and soy bean belt in the United States has dangerous nitrate levels in their drinking water? Business and Republicans think regulations are too expensive.  But communities, such as Des Moines, with polluted water pay enormous amounts of taxpayer money to clean their water.  Smaller communities often must drink and use this dangerous water.

This is a wonderful story of farmers regulating themselves and trying new things to protect our water resources. Read it here.

Then there is the drug industry.  Is there anyone that thinks their self-regulation and monopolies are working? MORE regulation is needed of the drug industry!!

It is less expensive to keep from polluting our air and water in the first place, but of course business doesn’t have to pay for the pollution and sick people they create.  Five million people die from air pollution every year.

Never vote for a candidate who promises to cut regulations. They can’t be trusted with the health of people or the earth.  They are not for what is good for our children, wildlife nor for the good of human beings on this planet!  In the long run clean-up is more expensive than doing the right thing in the first place.

Clean Air Act

http://time.com/4219575/air-pollution-deaths/

wpid-wp-1412011643040.jpeg

 

When It Comes To Plastic

Lake Superior and all lakes are precious, protect them!
Lake Superior and all lakes are precious, protect them!

Yesterday I was at the public library in Superior, Wisconsin.  I was impressed with an educational display by Wisconsin Coastal Management . They had a large display of trash that a student group had picked up from a one day beach trash pick-up from a local Lake Superior beach.  Ideas from the trash collected created an educational poster for the public. Plastic breaks into tiny bits, is eaten by our fish, and probably will last hundreds of years, maybe forever!

This is their excellent education piece:wp-image-493016558jpeg.jpeg