Top Ten Things You Can Do To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
I just jacked this blog from Sura Faraj’s Facebook page. It’s a pretty provocative list.
How do you pick ten things when there are so many to choose from? It’s pretty tough, so I thought I’d just start my own list (in no particular order) and ask you all to add one or two or ten more things. We can whittle it down from there. Or make it into a zine.
1. Stop drinking coffee (after all, it’s shipped from a long way away)
2. Take public transit and ride your bike.
3. Take local vacations. Visit the places in your city that visitors love, but you’ve never or rarely seen, b/c you take them for granted.
4. Insulate your houses, put plastic on the windows, put on sweaters and long johns and turn your heat down.
5. Buy food from local growers (within 100 miles), or grow your own food. Most of the food we eat is shipped in from an average of 1500 miles away. (Think of all the things we eat that come from far away — bananas, mangoes, rice, potatoes from Idaho, apples from New Zealand. I just heard that most garlic is from China. wtf?)
6. Question your consumerism. Do you really need more stuff?
7. Stop having children. Not only is overpopulation one of our biggest problems, you’re going to have to watch your children suffer through what we are dishing out to them.
8. Work to end corporate charters. Corporations are forcing our govt to its knees on the economy, peak oil, climate change, war, giant agribusiness, water rights, surveillance, the prison industrial complex, and the list goes on ad nauseum.
9. Hang with friends. More bodies keep you warmer, give you hope, generate ideas, bond you tightly. When the proverbial shit hits the fan, it’s organized groups (think fundamentalists and gangs) who will fill power vacuums. We need to counter that with our own organized and bonded selves.
10. Barter. It builds relationships, saves money and keeps the exchange local.
11. Repurpose everything. Reduce your garbage and your recycling.
Well, that’s 11. Feel free to add to this list.
Speaking of, check out this video by LYVEF: Shut Up, Windmill!
