Earth Day

It’s Earth Day!   Time to show our planet some extra love.  Hard not to get the message from Earth Day Canada’s 2021 campaign where it shows the animals having to clean up their polluted environments themselves.  Ouch.  Earth Day Canada is hoping to raise awareness about the urgency of taking action for the environment and to encourage us to take action every day.

And it doesn’t have to be big.  It can be as small as picking up a piece of garbage that you see out on a walk.  Organizing a large park cleanup.

The latest campaign invites Canadians to share what they are doing on social media using the hashtags #TakeCareofthePlanet  and #EarthDay2021

It’s up to each and every one of us to make a difference and take care of our planet.

We can change our eating habits – eat organic, eat local, reduce our food waste, or eat less meat.

We can lower the termostat, replace light bulbs with low-energy light bulbs.  Limit the sending of emails – a typical year of incoming emails would add 136 kg to our carbon footprint, the same as 320 km travelled by car.  Be careful not to send large attachments and delete emails regularly are other ways to reduce your digital impact. Unsubscribe from newsletters.  Watch fewer online videos: In 2019, watching these videos that are hosted on massive servers around the world generated the equivalent of Spain’s CO2 emissions! Reading a book, creating, cooking, spending time with your friends and family: there are so many opportunities to have fun in a different way.

You can make your own cosmetics, and cleaning products.   Shop thrift stores, second-hand shops and garage sales. Reuse, recycle.  As much as possible.
Walk instead of drive when you can.  Take public transit.

Grow your own vegetable garden. Plant nectar-giving plants to attract pollinators: Melliferous flowers are more nutritious for pollinators because they are rich in nectar and pollen. Often very colourful, they attract our foraging friends better and from further away.

There are lots of things we can do in our community and in our own home each and every day to help take care of our planet.

And what Earth Day could possibly go by without a little encouraging music from my favourite band of all time?  Duran Duran – Planet Earth.  The soundtrack for all those do good deeds you’re about to embark on.

Happy Earth Day.  Let’s promise to keep showing it some love and taking care of it the best we can.

Categorised in: Afternoons

This post was written by Carrie Buchanan