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If someone asked you what was the single most important thing you could do to protect the environment, what would you say? Reduce energy consumption? Bring your own grocery bags to the store? Drive less? Eat less meat? There are all kinds of steps people take in an effort to go green. But what's the most important?
I put the question to a whole slew of green bloggers to find out what they thought, and as you might expect, I ended up with just as many different answers. Each blogger sent me a link to a post illustrating her response. Some answers were more philosophical, while some were very practical. Is your answer on this list?
THINK
Abbie from Farmers Daughter: Take Responsibility for Our Actions.
In her post, Can I Ever Go Back?, Abbie relates her ambivalence at the county fair: wanting to enjoy the food and animals and vendor tents, and yet acutely aware of the environmental consequences of her actions and the impact of the fair itself. She wonders if she can ever go back to life the way it was before. She concludes:
Although I didn’t make all of the best eco-choices while I was there, I was keenly aware of what I was choosing to do: throw out paper plates and napkins, recycle water bottles, and take breaths of second-hand smoke simply because I couldn’t get away from it.
I realize of course that I can never go back. I can never un-learn what I know about the environment and how my everyday actions impact the earth. With that knowledge comes a responsibility to act, to make good choices.
Katie from Kitchen Stewardship: Live Consciously.
Katie illustrates the idea of living consciously by asking us to imagine ourselves as a super hero who has been knocked out on the floor, and she asserts that this is the state in which many of us live our lives. She enumerates the ways she wants us to wake up to the impact of our actions and uses the example of the "peanut on the floor" to demonstrate how changing our perspective can change our consciousness.
When you are in your kitchen this week or shopping for food, give your best attempt to dig deeply into each action and decision. When you find yourself doing something out of habit or losing your consciousness, picture yourself lying unconscious on the floor. Then bust out the smelling salts, take a sniff, and get up, dear hero! Increase your awareness of the peanut on the floor. Maintain consciousness in the kitchen.
Want to know what peanuts on floors have to do with consciousness? Read her post, On the Importance of Conscious Thought, to find out.
EAT
Anna Hackman from Green Talk: Grow a Garden.
Anna wrote me:
Growing my garden has to be my number one answer. Reducing food miles, helping promote bees and beneficial insects at home, reducing stress, composting my waste, and providing organic food to keep me healthy. Now, if I can only get my kids to eat what I grow.
A couple of Anna's favorite posts on gardening are Planning Meals Around Your Garden and Mother Earth Intended Food To Be Eaten From The Vine.
Karen Hanrahan from Best of Mother Earth: Feed the Planet.
Karen answered my question in a new post:
If I had to decide just one thing to protect our planet earth — I’d say feed it.
By that I mean clean up the whole food thing.
To me that means no one is hungry ever and we get back to the basics – slow food, scratch cooking, dinner together every day, a deeper understanding of local and seasonal – food that is clean, nutritious and plentiful.
Isle Dance: Keep it Organic.
Keep it organic. Organic food. Organic clothing. Organic building materials. Organic reproduction. Of everything.
Because, as she explains in the About section of her blog before listing over 150 items she now lives without, "We are organic."
REDUCE
Amber Strocel from Strocel.com: Stop Buying So Much Stuff.
The most important thing we can do is to stop buying so much stuff, and especially new stuff. The rampant consumption of material goods takes a tremendous environmental toll, and so often it's just not necessary. Most of us have many pairs of shoes that we never wear, and many
