There is sure no lack of things to worry about at the moment, agreed? Not just piddly stuff, either. BIG things like – The Economy, fuel costs, bullying in schools, and global Warming (in with that, lets lump floods, fires, droughts, landslides, tornadoes) giant snakes taking over the Everglades, and fill in your own blanks, et cetera.
So, this possibly isn’t the time to be paying much attention to relatively non-catastrophic environmental issues such as recycling, reducing and reusing; Conserving water and power.
Do you have those ubiquitous blue bins? Do you use them to store stuff in your garage? Do you turn off the light when you leave a room? Do you think about repairing something before tossing it? How about turning your automatically operated sprinkler system off when it’s raining?
As useless, annoying, and ‘a waste of time’ this stuff can seem, the overall long-range down the road impact can be wa-ay bigger than it seems. Wa-ay bigger. It can maybe even mean the difference between our planet continuing as a place where humans can survive or – well, not.
Because, all these little things we do – or don’t do – can have a cumulative effect. If everybody leaves their lights on, tosses their trash out the car window, gobbles fossil fuels, just basically slurps up resources as if they were infinite – at some point it will end up being, from our little planet’s viewpoint, like being nibbled to death by ducks.
Here at Habitat for Humanity we try in several ways to be good stewards of the resources we use: we do recycle as much as we can; every home we build has a solar water heater, we use low VOC paints; and Energy Star appliances. And in the classes our homebuyers are required to attend, we teach ways to care for and conserve all our resources.
Semi-scary trivia:
Current world population – 7 billion (In 1970 it was 3.7 billion)
Peeps per square mile – 34.5
Peeps per square mile land only – 117.2
At the current growth rate – it’ll double in 54 years
Have a good one.
And TURN THAT LIGHT OFF!
