What is Important to You?
If I asked you to name the most important things in this world to you I’m sure the answers I would get wouldn’t be outside the expect answers, God, family, money, love, health, yourself. I don’t dispute that any of those answers are right, I myself believe that God is the most important, but I would like to add one more thing to this list; the earth. Many people would not name the earth as part of their list yet most of what has been named cannot exist without it, which kind of pushes our planet to near the top of that list, don’t you think?
A while ago I focused on global warming for a few weeks, I spoke on how global warming affects us more than we realise. It is very vital that we understand this so it will help us with making our choices in everyday life. You don’t have to change your whole life, or live in the jungle before you can contribute to the environment but saving our planet is more than just being a good person, and its more than just paperless solutions. So…
Why don’t you plant a tree in your house?
If you live in an apartment, try and keep some potted plants around, on the windowsills, and in your bedroom in the corner where it wont interrupt movement around your house. The reason for this is simple. The plants provide you with oxygen, and they also absorb the carbons that you exhale which prevents then from getting to the ozone. The plants are a life form that we depend on heavily, for clean air and an unpolluted environment. There are at least a billion households in the world, if each of them had a plant in their house that makes a billion plants that are absorbing carbons that are harmful to our ozone layer and also our health, providing us and other animals that we use as food, with oxygen.
Would you consider joining an environmental programme?
There are many, with names like “clean up our streets” and “environmental sanitation day” programs that focus on bettering our environment. These programs sometimes don’t seem like the most important thing in the world especially when you think about trying to fit then with your busy schedules and thoughts like what will cleaning up one small environment do for our planet? This is not the right attitude to have. Think positive! You can make it a family event to teach your kids on the importance of the environment or force your friends to go with you. It’s not for just cleaning but you being there is a form of advertisement and you’re raising awareness about the state of the environment, and sometimes you just reach the person that will make a difference.
What do you think about carpooling?
This system is used by people who live around the same area to save money. Carpooling is an effective way of preventing carbon emissions, because lets face it, when it comes to vehicles you cannot eliminate carbon completely but you can drastically reduce it. Additionally, public transportation, cycling, walking are also better ways to get around without leaving a carbon footprint the size of Texas.
This is so important, and I’m glad that so many companies and individuals have picked up on this trend that hopefully will last… maybe forever? Companies now make their packaging from recycled materials; there are labels on products that indicate they should be recycled, people use recycling bins and buy products made out of recycled materials. The reason for this is quite straightforward, recycling prevents the production of so many new materials, because for every pound of new product, four pounds of carbons are emitted into the atmosphere. Over a billion ounces of new product is produced a year which means over four billion ounces of carbons are emitted by various factories and rapidly deplete the already weakening ozone layer.
Are you finding out new ways to do things?
Nowadays many strive to find paperless solutions and are incorporating the use of e-forms and paperless products into their professional lifestyle with apps such as notepad and SignTech. It’s like a step over recycling. Rather than use the paper at all its completely eliminated and everything is done on a matter-less platform. You don’t have to get the paper to read the papers, online newspapers take care of that and for books, sometimes hardcovers are preferred because of the simplicity but for the most part e-books are now being used, with devices like kindle and sites like Wattpad. That aside there are even more solutions like cloud-based storage so you don’t have to always buy things like external hard drives to save all your data, and if the system or your hard drives fail, you have a backup that you can access from anywhere.
What I’m trying to ask really is the earth important enough to you to make these changes in your life?