Greg Michaels: Earth Day

Today, April 22nd is Earth Day! What does this mean to you? Are you one to go out of your way to conserve, reduce, reuse and recycle? Do you buy environmentally friendlier products, ie: CFL bulbs, re-chargeable batteries, etc?

We recycle what we know they'll take collection day, milk jugs, cardboard, box board and jars. We're kind of clueless on the plastics and what the city takes. We put everything in the bin and if everything is gone, we're happy.

We could do better but we do reuse, like ice cream containers and bags, however if some of the packaging and bags were better quality, maybe we could reuse more. We buy CFL bulbs, I'm not even sure if you can still buy the incandescent type but we do our best to be ecological under reasonable demands. We don't compost, but we don't use weed killer either. I actually don't mind crab grass because it's doesn't grow as fast and makes for a more rugged backyard.

I would carpool if someone who I worked with lived near me and we worked the same hours but that isn't an option. So I travel 70 miles a day, but that's about the worst of my personal destruction except maybe when it was the late 80s and I used aerosol hairspray.

As a nation we are doing better environmentally than we were 20-30 years ago but that is probably because most of the factories are gone. The fuel economy in cars today, solar panels, wind, etc. do help. The flip-side to the coin, we're doing better, but the air pollution has just moved to Asia. I know, at least it's not here, but China and Malaysia aren't as far away as you think. The Earth's diameter is only 8,000 miles and her circumference is not much more than many of us drive in a year, at just over 24,000 miles. It's a small planet.

In Asia also makes much of the products we use on a daily basis so to a degree it is partly our problem. What happens on the other side of the world still affects our environment especially if we're buying it by the shipload all of the time.

I can't fix anything in a 400 word essay but just wanted to say let's work to make environmental living cheaper by making choices for ourselves instead of forcing regulations that don't do anything but relocate the problem.

On this Earth Day do what you can to help, maybe shut off the heat for the day, bike to work or remember your cloth bags for the grocery store.