Blog Action Day - WATER

Today is Blog Action Day. It is a day that hopefully will help raise awareness of our tiny island home, Planet Earth. Today, all around the world, thousands of people are blogging about ONE subject. You can go here to view the list of participants and read what they have to say.

The subject is WATER.

ALL the WATER that is on Planet Earth is ALL the WATER there has ever been and it is ALL the WATER that will ever be.

Think about it. We can neither create nor destroy water. What we CAN do is abuse what we have. We can use more of it than we need to and most assuredly we can pollute it.

In honor of WATER I made up this little guide

W - Waste not, want not.

A - Act.

T - Trash or Treasure

E - Environment/Ecology

R - Reduce, reuse, recycle

Waste not, want not: An old adage, yet one that speaks to many aspects of our lives, particularly in the current era, which seems to be built around planned obsolescence. Do we really need a new car every few years? New jeans with holes in them? Another plastic bottle full of lotion?

Act: DO SOMETHING, ANYthing, to reduce the use of water, to reduce the amount of plastic.

1. If you don't have a low flush toilet, fill up a liter bottle (I know, it's a plastic jug!) with pebbles or sand or water and put it in your toilet tank. You won't be using as much water when you flush. Hey, and you don't have to flush every time you pee. (Old island trick since we survive on the rain water we collect in our cistern.)
2. Take shorter showers and/or install a low flow shower head. It really doesn't take 20 or 30 minutes to get clean. I take mine in 5 to10 minutes. You can turn on the water, get wet, turn it off and spend a lot of time scrubbing with soap. Then turn the water back on to rinse off. (Old island trick since we survive on the rain water we collect in our cisterns.)
3. Don't leave the tap running while brushing your teeth or doing the dishes. Think of where that water's going, down the drain into the sewer. What a waste!
4. Don't buy water in plastic bottles. Here in the U. S. we REALLY don't need to. If you don't like the taste of your tap water, put a water filter on your tap.

Trash or Treasure: Do you want to trash our planet home or do you want to treasure it? Do you want YOUR grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live on a dump heap (a pile of plastic) or in a garden? Your choice.

Environment/Ecology: This planet earth is our only home. We are as much a part of it as are the plants and animals. All life exists in a symbiotic relationship with the earth. None of us can survive without it. To think that we will someday live on the moon or Mars is ludicrous when we are already polluting the space around our planet with "space junk." Arthur C. Clarke predicted that it could get so cluttered with junk we wouldn't be able to launch rockets! Okay, say we find another planet like this one, it would take THOUSANDS of years to reach. And who knows what we'd find when we got there IF we survived the journey...I mean...really. We HAVE to be realistic, the earth MADE us. What I know for sure is that the earth is a marvelous wonderful recycling machine. We may destroy ourselves by destroying the environment/ecology, but the EARTH will survive. The earth will recycle us and all our waste and will evolve new life. We are expendable, people! We don't need to be here to keep the earth going, she'll do just fine without us. So if we want to be around for a while longer we better get our act together and stopping shitting in our bed.

Reduce, reuse, recycle: I so hate plastic. I believe that plastic, more than any other substance we produce will be our destruction. Particularly now that it is in our oceans. Plastic is not biodegradable folks. It just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. The smaller the pieces the easier for various kinds of marine life to eat it. And that isn't a good thing because plastic is NOT DIGESTIBLE. The animals that eat plastic die of starvation. Long after their bodies decay and rot away, the plastic they ingested will remain.

WE cannot survive without the oceans. Yet here we are slowly killing them with plastic.

Here are few things YOU can do to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic.
1. Use stoneware/china instead of plastic dishes.
2. Use stainless flatware instead of plastic.

3. Use paper plates instead of plastic or styro plates.
4. Use stainless and/or wooded cooking utensils instead of plastic.
5. Use Pyrex or Anchor glass containers for storage instead of plastic.
6. Use aluminum foil (its recyclable) or wax paper or freezer wrap(it's biodegradable/recyclable) instead of plastic wrap.
7. Eliminate one plastic bottle by going back to bar soap instead of using liquid bath soap.
8. Eliminate one plastic bottle by finding a shampoo that has conditioner already in it.
9. Reuse the the bag inside the cereal box for freezing food or refrigerating cut fruit instead of using plastic bags.
10. Use reusable grocery bags. Reuse the plastic bags you might put your fruit and veggies in, just stick them back in your grocery bag once you've unpacked them.
11. Try to buy items that come in all biodegradable packaging or have a reduced amount of plastic packaging.
12. Get yourself an aluminum water bottle, stop buying water in plastic bottles.

13. You know those little red bb pellets people use in their air pistols/guns? They are THE worst thing to use. All KINDS of animals think those little round red bbs are food. Particularly birds. DON'T USE THEM!

14. Recycle, recycle, recycle.
15. Make noise, speak up, encourage family and friends to reduce, reuse, recycle. If they don't know how, show them the way. Show them pictures of the consequences.

Now that I've beat you over the head, please, put in your ear-buds, sit back, relax and listen to this wonderful song by Supertramp. Imagin it is the ocean singing to YOU.

I LOVE the 12 string guitar on this song, and the Bahai message is perfect.