Blog Action Day – Climate Change
October 15, 2009
Today is Blog Action Day. I participated last year, so when the email came through reminding me the day was coming up again, I thought, “hey, why not?” Of course, after I agreed to write a post about climate change, I remembered that I have a “mommy blog” You don’t often see climate change articles on mommy blogs. I scoured the blog action day sight for suggestions on what other mommy blogs might be writing about. They had suggestions for political blogs, health blogs, technology blogs, design blogs, travel blogs, but not for mommy blogs…
Naturally, I started to stress a bit about what the heck I have to say about climate change besides, yeah, it’s bad. I think most of us agree about that. Climate change sucks. Thinking about the state of the world when my kids get old enough to notice and appreciate it depresses me. So what can I do to help? Well, lots of things. Of course, changing the way we do things can be hard, and inconvenient, and sometimes costly. But, the hope is that the outcome will be a healthier planet for our kids, right? And that I think, is worth the sacrifice.
This site has some simple and relatively easy suggestions on what we can do. Of the nine tips there, we do 8. I think that’s pretty good… As soon as Xander was old enough to follow direction, we assigned him the chore of throwing away the recycling in our house. We’ve got 2 bins on our enclosed porch. Xander has to take plastics and cardboard from the kitchen to the porch. Sometimes he thinks this is great fun. Other times, it really is a chore for him, and he tries to avoid it. So far though, he’s pretty good about doing it. We’ve just recently started “littering” discussions, but I don’t think he quite understands the concept of what is biodegradable…
I also think that we’ve been doing these things for a while now, and maybe it’s time to add something new to our climate change regimen. This guy has vowed to have a paper towel free home by the end of the month. I’m not sure I can quite get there with a 3 year old and a 9 month old, but I think that I can do a few things differently. I can adjust our pajama and towel usage to cut down on the amount of laundry we’re doing. I can keep a washcloth in the kitchen for wiping up faces after meals instead of using paper towels and I can make an effort to purchase local foods when available (though this is often a more expensive option that we can’t always afford…).
So my question to you for Blog Action Day 2009 is what can YOU do?
