Earth Day 2009

See last year’s post for a still-worthy list of Earth Day actions.

My top recommendation is still to contact your legislators (and editorial pages) to let them know about your support for environmentally-friendly policies.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that dealing with cancer does limit my energy and ability to keep up with political action and personal conservation goals. For example, I had planned to add canning to my list of eat local goals, but if that happens at all this year it’ll be on a small scale. Our garden is scaled back to a minimum.

Still, here are some things I’d like to see:

A real national conservation movement. I know the Obama administration wants to provide incentives for people to weatherproof their homes, for example, but I’m talking about putting some serious money into publicizing conservation. Let’s have national campaigns to drive less, turn out the lights in businesses after hours, keep the thermostats of public buildings at reasonable temperatures, eliminate unnecessary water use, eat less meat, etc., as well as issuing guidelines for energy conservation at home.

More funding for public transportation. Buses running once an hour (as they do in Mobile, when they run on time) are not a legitimate public transportation system. This is not a reliable and practical way for people to get around.

Community gardens in every city, and conversion of any unused space to green space of some sort. A garden isn’t that hard to knock down if someone wants to build on the site later, so that land won’t lose value, and having a garden for even a year is better than having nothing at all.

Have a national conversation about changing our consumption habits and restructuring our economy.

For myself & my family, I’d like to:

• reduce driving to a minimum (there’s still way too much driving going on)
• reduce waste (mostly from packaging)
• make more Earth-friendly clothing choices (I already try to buy only organic cotton for the few things I buy myself, but my growing girl goes through a lot more clothes each year than I do)
• continue edible landscaping and reduce lawn space
• minimize energy & resource use
• eat more meatless meals (we already eat a few meatless meals a week, and go light on meat in the meals where we do have it, but we have room to do more)

And just for kicks, here are a few Earth Day posts from elsewhere on the web:

See the end of this Slow Food Blog post to “[read] more about the connection between climate change and food”.

Culinate draws our attention to a low-carbon diet calculator that allows you to calculate the footprint of your meal.

A thoughtful review of Mark Bittman’s Food Matters, another in the list of recent “eat less meat and more vegetables and grains and save the planet” books, this one by a popular cookbook writer, columnist, and food celebrity.

Also from Culinate, links to tips for Climate-friendly food.

Finally, this was posted months ago on the DotEarth blog: reader suggestions for addressing climate change that journalist Andrew Revkin forwarded to the then-forming Obama administration.