How can we be more sustainable?

“Don’t buy me stuff that will wind up in a landfill. spend some time and make memories with me instead” Weatherman Paul Douglas

The shopping and entertaining season is upon us. How can we be more sustainable in our purchases and lifestyle?

Our choices can help people Thrive!

A Startibune.com letter to editor today:

“The holidays can make us feel trapped by traditions that dictate what we buy, where we travel and who we see. For those looking for more freedom of choice this season, I recommend scrutinizing how you spend money and what cultures and policies those dollars ultimately support. Was this gift made in America? How does that store treat its workers? Is my credit card helping finance the Dakota Access pipeline? While such choices may appear innocuous, their aggregate impact can shutter businesses and victimize people both near and far. Or — if we think critically — our choices can help people thrive.

The election has passed, but we can vote with every dollar for the type of world we endorse and wish to promote.” Robert Beets, Minneapolis

And ideas from Earth911 to make less trash http://earth911.com/living-well-being/zero-waste-how-to-make-less-trash/

https://www.givingtuesday.org/

Attitude of Gratitude

More on kindness and gratitude from a blog I follow. Happy Thanksgiving!

Annette Rochelle Aben

Thank you for your attitude of gratitude! Every person who has every stopped to appreciate a flower growing along the side of the road, anyone who has smiled at another for a simple kindness offered, know that your gratitude has been felt all around the world. Whenever you have felt the need to and then have followed through with saying thank you, you have created a chain reaction whose vibration continuously circulates.

Affirmation: I am creating and living within the loop of continuously circulating gratitude

I appreciate you. Love, Annette Rochelle

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Kindness and Gratitude

Wishing you a week of kindness and gratitude

Happy Climatarian Thanksgiving!

Bulk shopping reduces food and packaging waste

What is a climatarian? I get this question often.

“A climatarian is somebody who chooses their food with the climate in mind and, in particular, replaces beef and lamb with pork or poultry to cut their carbon footprint by a ton a year.” http://climatesnetwork.com/index.php

Read the entire essay here

Reducing your beef consumption is huge, but to me being a climatarian is much more. A climatarian thinks of the climate every step of the day! A climatarian also buys local, reduces their food waste, and reduces energy used in cooking. All this is easy to make part of a terrific Thanksgiving meal!

To me being a climatarian also means reducing energy for shopping trips. It is more difficult to walk or take public transportation to shop, but everyone can combine their car errands and leave out an ingredient instead of driving to get that one item!

Celebrate kindness and gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

America Recycles Day

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:

Bottle caps should stay on bottles.
Magazines and glossy paper can be recycled!
Shredded paper is hard to recycle, it flies around. Compost shredded paper.
Food stained cardboard(pizza boxes) should not be recycled. Again, they can be composted along with paper egg cartons.
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.
Choose glass or aluminum over plastic. Glass and aluminum are easier to recycle.
More ideas
Get into the recycle mindset
Good Luck!

Be Kind!

A 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.

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 ….

We will all be happier.

Veteran’s Day 2016

I 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.

“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

Please Vote!

Paul Wellstone

Protecting our Waterways

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.

Category: sustainable