If you’re anything like my family when we pledged to become more eco-conscious, you may be completely overwhelmed by where to begin.  There are a million  different ways (literally) that you can be friendly to your environment, and in two weeks there’s a global event that you  can easily be a part of and maybe start a trend in your family and even your community.  

Earth Hour was started in Australia in 2007 in hopes of getting people in Sydney to take a stand and promote awareness of global warming and energy sustainability.  The movement grew worldwide in 2008, and 2009 already has over 1880 cities in 80 countries dedicated to going dark during their Earth Hour and hopes to include over 1 billion people.

 From the Earth Hour Facebook page:

 ”In 2009, at 8.30pm on March 28, we are asking people across the world to turn off their lights and join together in creating the vital conversation about the future of our precious planet. Earth Hour is a message of hope and a message of action. Everyone can make a difference.”

Earth Hour is relative to where you live: 8:30 pm in your time zone on March 28 is your Earth Hour. Make a plegde to turn out all lights (and even turn off appliances and electronics) for an hour.  You may even make it a monthly, weekly, or even daily part of your contribution to our Earth. If you want to make your Earth Hour a local community event, start here.

So make plans to have a nice candlelight dinner, go for a walk to watch the stars, have a block party via moonlight, or pick a great vantage point of your town and have a “viewing” party. Take before and after pictures and spread the word.  Who knows, your Earth Hour may be the perfect catalyst to your new green life.

Founded by the NWF in 1938, National Wildlife Week was started to promote appreciation of nature and the awareness of wildlife conservation. The official website has great, informative suggestions and is very kid-friendly. There are different activities for kids, teens, adults and teachers, and even a guide to observe the wildlife in your area.  

The National Wildlife Federation is also hosting an Animal Photo Contest through July 20, 2009.  For more info or to enter, click here.

Leave a comment and let me know what you and your kids saw in your area!

If you want to help out, go to the GBBC website and print out the checklist for your region. Then, in as little as 15 minutes for at least one of the four days, you can check off the birds that you see in your backyard, neighborhood or local park. When you’re done, you go back to the website and submit all of your information.

Don’t worry if you aren’t on a first name basis with your friendly neighborhood fowl; on the site you will find a link to an identification guide. There’s also a page for fun kids activities, and even a form to enter your bird photos for the 2009 GBBC Photo Contest.

If you’re looking for a little more participation than just sitting by the window or on a park bench, check to see if there is a coinciding GBBC event scheduled for your area.

It is estimated that between 1971 and 2006, about 50% of the US honeybee population has disappeared. It’s called Colony Collapse Disorder, but nobody really definitively knows what causes it.  There are a lot of speculations about what contributes to CCD: mites, viruses, transportation, pesticides, even electromagnetic radiation (coming from cell phone use).  We could have our debate all day long but it won’t bring them back, or keep them from vanishing anytime soon, though there are ways we can help.

As with any important topic, awareness is the best way to induce action.  Haagen Daaz Ice Cream has a great website geared towards educating us about honeybees, and even has a download-able lesson plan for families or classrooms to learn about the importance of bees in our ecosystem. You can also create your own bee and send it in an e-mail to spread the word to your friends and family.  

Another way that you can help save the bees is support your local beekeepers and honey producers. Buy and use all the local honey and beeswax that you can. This will not only help ensure that we continue to have local growers (a lot have thrown in the towel because of the losses of colonies they have sustained) but will also support the local economy (most honey found on the grocery store shelf is imported from Chile or Argentina!).

Lastly, you can plant a bee garden. As I mentioned in my previous post, planting an organic wildflower garden is a great way to attract all sorts of wildlife and insects, and honeybees are no exception. Mix in some Cosmos, Jasmine, Lamb’s Ear, Lavender, or Sunflowers,  learn to identify you local bees, maybe even build a bee house for them if you’re so inclined. Whatever you so, spread the word about our endangered bees and why they are so important to us. Hopefully you’ll never have to worry about whether or not you can get your next strawberry milkshake fix.

With snow still in the forecast and Mr. Punxsutawney Phil supposedly thinking we’ve got 5 more weeks of winter, I may seem a bit ahead of myself talking about gardens;  in fact, now is the perfect time to start planning one.  

Whether you’ve had one for years or want to finally find out if you have a green thumb, planting a garden is a great way to teach your children the cycle of plant life.  Backyard gardens not only create cleaner air around us, but also produce beautiful foliage and flowers and/or fruits and vegetables that we can enjoy in our own homes.  

Our family has talked about planting a garden for years.  Previously, we lived in such a hot, dry environment that the one year we tried to plant a raised-bed vegetable garden, the Spring was so hot that everything burned and died.  We got a little discouraged, but now that we live in a much more temperate atmosphere, we are excited about growing our own veggies and fruits.  We will probably do a raised bed again, which is perfect if you do not have the space or the right soil to plant a garden right into the ground.  

You can make raised beds any size and shape to fit your yard and better yet, you can use recycled or repurposed materials to frame them.  Old tires of different sizes would be perfect: get a discarded car tire (or larger), clean them, then fill your soil.  Now you’ve got an original circular garden. Arrange three or four of them together.  Now you can plant all sorts of wildflower seeds which will not only smell great and beautify your backyard, but also attract new birds and insects to your area.  

You could also play on the circular theme of your raised bed tire garden: turn it into a pizza garden!  Plant all of the veggies, fruits and herbs you love on your favorite pizza (Pineapple might be a bit difficult, but you get the idea.)  The kids will have a great time watching and anticipating the day that they can harvest their produce and “decorate” their own dinner.

Best of all, both types of gardens can be grown organically. Just think, if you find you’ve got enough room and passion, you can grow extra produce and sell it at your local farmer’s market.

Hope this gets you and the kids excited for Spring. If you want to take organic gardening a step further, you can always learn to recycle your rainwater for a drip irrigation system, or if you get really ambitious you could start your own compost pile, too.

I first heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch about 6 years ago, and it has really stuck with me ever since.  Basically, this monstrosity is an area of the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii TWICE the size of TEXAS (over 500,000 sq.mi.) and almost 100 feet deep in which different types of plastic debris is caught in a gyre (a giant eddy where three different oceanic currents converge). These plastics never completely biodegrade or disintegrate, but they do break down into pieces small enough for wildlife to ingest.  Since birds and animals can’t digest it, they die.

A couple of really good articles can explain it better than I:  CBC News and Wiki.  

Realistically, we both know that there is no way that we are ever going to quit producing plastics completely; there are definitely products that we cannot live without that cannot (yet) be made of any other material.  But what we can do is be more careful in what we purchase and how we dispose of it.  Buy a container that you can refill rather than buying bottled water, get reusable cloth shopping bags instead of using plastic grocery bags.  Buy food products that come in glass containers rather than plastic.  Also, keep in mind that just because some plastics can be recycled doesn’t mean they are.  Many types are not cost effective to recycle (even thought they have the little recycle logo on the bottom) and so the percentage of them that just get tossed into a landfill with everything else is fairly high.

If you must buy something that is made of plastic, make sure you put it in the recycle bin (or better yet, try to re-purpose it).  Pass it on…

I’m no expert when it comes to deciphering ingredient lists and deciding what’s safe for my family and eco-friendly at the same time, although I’m learning a lot.  It’s very difficult to read a label and know how to pronounce the chemical names, let alone know if they’re safe or not (usually if you can’t, they’re not).  I started checking a lot of labels after reading an article on ingredient disclosure.  As a general rule of thumb, ingredients lists are usually omitted because they don’t want you to know what’s in them, and there’s no real requirement for them to be listed unless they have active ingredients or are potentially hazardous.  Always check to see if the product has a website and lists the ingredients there or has an Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS).  If you can’t find an MSDS for your product, it might be here under the product name or the manufacturer name.

Even if the ingredients are listed it is very hard to know what’s considered eco-friendly in a cleaning product.  There are all sorts of statements that products can add to their labels to make you think you are buying an environmentally-safe product.  According to Consumer Reports’ Greener Choices website, terms like “non-toxic,” “eco-safe,” “environmentally safe,” and “no CFC’s” don’t even have official definitions or guidelines, so there is no way to prove that they are or aren’t what they claim.  It’s all marketing mumbo-jumbo to confuse you into thinking that you are buying an environmentally responsible product.  Fortunately, there are an increasing number of household and cleaning products that use these and other terms that are exactly what they say they are.  Ultimately, you are the one responsible for knowing what products you are putting into your reusable bamboo shopping bag.

Please let me know if there is a product you’re not sure about or would like to see me review.

My husband and I are big outdoor people, and we always knew that the majority of our family activities would include Mother Nature.   When our 3-year-old started to get bored with walking down the same street to go to the same park day after day, we had to start looking for more  creative ways for him to enjoy the outdoors and pique his interests.  So I did what I do best; went on-line and researched local events and outdoor activities, most of which were either above his age group or didn’t fit into our schedule.  Then I found an article on geocaching.  I was hooked from the first paragraph.  You see, along with being a wife and mom, I’m also somewhat of a tech geek.  I love gadgets, especially ones that I can afford.  Within hours of finding the article I had researched GPS devices and found myself at the local electronics store by the end of the day (you can get a no-frills model for less than $100, or rent one to try geocaching before you buy).  

For those of you not familiar, geocaching is an outdoor “game” in which someone out there has stashed a “cache,” or as my kids now call them, hidden treasure, at a specific location and posted the global positioning coordinates on a website.  What you do, once you have a GPS, is find ‘caches that are in your area, mark the coordinates as a waypoint in your GPS, follow the trail and start hunting.  You can choose one that’s close, a few small ones, or make an all day event out of it.  We typically try to do at least 3 or 4 at a time, which can take anywhere from 1 hour to 3 hours; it just depends on how far away they are, and how much time you want to spend trying to find them, and how well hidden they are.

So now you’re asking, “Ok, this sounds like fun, but how does it have anything to do with being more eco-friendly?”  Well, I personally believe that any time spent outdoors increases our awareness of our surroundings and reminds us to respect Mother Nature.  Other than that, our family has always turned our treasure hunts into nature hikes, no matter if the ‘cache we’re looking for is on a residential street or two miles off  a hiking trail.  We bring our field guides  to try to identify plants, animals or birds we haven’t seen before.  Also, since one of the geocaching mottos is “Cache In, Trash Out,” we carry extra bags with us to pick up litter that we find on our way to or from.  We have a contest to see who can find the most trash.  One of our favorite things to “trade” or add to a geocache is a repurposed film cannister (remember those?) with a rolled up grocery bag inside so that someone else can take it and fill it on their way out.

Geocaching takes a little prep work, but there are so many ways that you can spin this “sport” into a teaching/learning experience for the whole family; it will always be at the top of our list for outdoor entertainment and appreciation.

Getting the kids to pitch in with household tasks can be a chore itself, let alone trying to teach them a lesson in the process.  What’s worse is we used to be able to bribe them with an allowance, but now that everyone’s tightening their purse string, that’s no longer an option for some of us.  Here’s how we reward our kids for helping out around the house and teach them a couple of things in the process:

Like all kids, my boys love television.  I’m not thrilled about them wanting to spend all of their free time in front of it (another future post) but there is an upside, at least for me.  You see, besides the cartoon channels that would hold them captive for hours on end, my boys LOVE the Discovery Channel.  Sometimes they will actually choose it over cartoons, and are particularly enthralled with How It’s Made.  In numerous episodes the show has focused on items that are made from reused or recycled glass, paper, aluminum or steel products.  The boys love to get the inside scoop about the items that we use on a daily basis and when we talk about the products they have seen, we make a game out of identifying things we have used that day that may have started out as something else.

In our area, the waste collection service provides a comingled recycling bin into which we can put all our paper, glass, aluminum, tin, and some plastics.  Glass goes in a separate container.  Our local grocery stores have recycling facilities for aluminum and glass with deposits, so we told the boys that they were in charge of recyclables and if they retained all of the aluminum cans and glass, they could share the money from taking it to the grocery store.   Believe it or not, I actually had to make a daily schedule for whose turn it was to take the recyclables out so that they wouldn’t fight over them.

Once a month, when we have collected enough to take downtown, they have fun feeding the cans and bottles into the machines.  Then they collect their coupons and proudly march inside the store to redeem them.  It usually doesn’t amount to more than $5 or so, but my boys (ages 7 and 4), get the satisfaction of knowing that they have helped to make new products out of used (a concept that has not been lost on them, especially when the Legos need a “new” home or mode of transportation) and they are also learning about what items cost and saving money.  I guess I’ve kinda lost my case that TV has no socially redeeming value.

After both reading the article, we decided to try to do the same.  It really doesn’t sound that hard, given the current state of our checking account.  The author and her husband had an exception list, as I think every family would: items that they were not willing to compromise on.  So here is my list of exceptions; I hope it will encourage you to get started, too:

1.       Food.  Obviously you can’t buy used food, nor would you really want to if you could.  (Restaurants can donate prepared meals to homeless shelters, though).

2.       Toiletries.  Things like toilet paper, deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, etc.  Again, would you want to?

3.       Socks and underwear.  Ok, I will try to at least check out bras at a consignment store, but I draw the line at used underwear and socks.  On further thinking I’m pretty sure that’s not even legal.  My kids will get brand spanking new socks and underwear.  And not made in China (more on that later, too).

4.       My husband and I will need a new mattress at some point this year (though my back has been reminding me for the past 3).  I will get a NEW, unused mattress, but from a secondhand store.  I’ve already checked them out.  They have them.

5.       Shoes are kind of iffy with me.  It really just depends on the shoe, and who it’s for.  And who it’s from.  I will take hand-me-down shoes for the kids from people that I know.  Buying them from a secondhand store I’m not so sure about.  It’s a personal thing.  Sorry.

6.       Toys.  It really depends on the toy.  Generally speaking, I don’t buy secondhand toys.  Not because I think my kids are above playing with used toys, but from a safety standpoint.  Once a toy is out of the box or packaging, it’s nearly impossible to know what age group the toy is for, and even harder to track to see if there’s been a safety recall for it.  My kids already have a lot of toys; they will just have to play with them longer.

7.       My baby will be transitioning into a bigger car seat.  This one I will not waver on, either, as I have first-hand knowledge of the dangers of used child safety seats.  Buying or using a used child safety seat is very tempting for some people because car seats can deceivingly look like they are in great condition.  You may still be able to check a used child seat for recalls if the original stickers are on it, but it is impossible to tell if a safety seat has been involved in a crash, and even a minor fender bender can compromise the safety of a child seat.  Also, in most areas of the country, there are significant temperature fluctuations throughout the year.  These temperature changes can also compromise the integrity of the plastic safety seats are made of, and the recommendation from the Safe Kids Coalition is that a child safety seat should only be used if it is less than six years old, depending on where you live, and NEVER if it has been in even a minor crash.  (On a side note:  to properly dispose of an old or unusable safety seat you should cut the straps out and throw away all parts in a garbage can or dumpster so that nobody can pick it up off the sidewalk and use it.  See, you learn something new everyday, huh?)

Think about it; we have purchased used cars and houses for decades.  Why not let yourself use this logic when you decide you “need” a coffee table or a bike for the kiddo?  I hope I’ve given you a few ideas on how to get started.  The bottom line is that not buying more than we really “have” to have will not only retrain us to think about reusing and repurposing items, but also save us money, and in this economy I don’t think anyone can fault you for that.