Earth Day

Yesterday we did manage to do some things to observe Earth Day.

Z and I each made collages from old Natural History magazines. Z's theme was "What the World Could Look Like if We Stopped Polluting"


and mine was "Being Green."


Then we replanted her hydroponic herb garden into regular pots. The basil had outgrown the container. She is also growing fennel and parsley.

And then we had some friends over and we served them a vegetarian dinner. Pere made vegetarian Thai red curry. I made a cheese, carmelized onion and olive pizza. And for dessert Pere made a recipes that will be familar to those of you who have been to LEGOland - deep fried apple fries with brown sugar. We rounded out the meal with some "organic" Stone Brewery Beer, 100% Organic Blood Orange Juice and organic French Berry Sparkling Lemonade.

I would also like to share some of the things we have been doing (at least what I can remember at the moment, this is not an exhaustive list). These first things we have been doing for years. The second list are things I started either right before New Years or at New Years as part of my resolutions

Live within walking distance to Pere's work (at least for two years, now he is 15 min away by car)
Walk to bookstore, movies, restaurants, grocery store, etc.
Eat less meat
Drive diesel - at least one of our cars, it gets 45 miles to the gallon
Use cloth napkins
Run the air and heat less often
Use appliances during off peak hours
Drink from water filtration center rather than buying single serving bottled water
Donate clothing and toys and household itens
Buy used items when possible instead of new ones
Reuse glass, boxes, wrapping paper, etc for crafts

New:
For science we are studying conservation and the environment
Recycle - our apartment complex doesn't so we drive our recycling out to a center every few days
Light bulbs - we changed them all to compact flourescent
Eat even less meat
Eat locally - Z is good about wanting to check to see how far food had to travel before we buy it
Shop at Farmer's Market
Ride bicycle twice a week instead of driving
Eat organic and whole foods
Grow our own herb garden
Read about 25 books on conservation an environmentalism - like the book It's Easy Being Green and put many of it's ideas into practice
Sometimes I remember to bring my cloth bag to the grocery
Stop eating at McDonalds
Conserve water
Use organic cleaning products

I am going to add one new "green deed" for Earth Day. We are going to buy food (and other sundries) with less packaging. This is all a work in progress and I was already trying to do this but I could do a lot better. I wasn't always thinking about it when I would buy individually wrapped string cheese for Z.