Happy Earth Day

To celebrate Earth Day on Saturday, Josh and I took Storey down to Woodlawn Lake to participate in the festivities.  It was a great day- beautiful weather, beautiful friends, beautiful baby.  Storey Mae was such a trooper.  She had a great time, despite missing her morning nap.  She was content people-watching, feeding in the park, taking a ride in her stroller (-even though the stroller became a cart for our free trees for a while), walking around in mom and dad's arms.

Good friends, Jon, Rachel, and Ethan Faunce and Uncle T.J joined us while we also met up with more good friends, the Everetts and the Menjivars.

I absolutely enjoyed being in the outdoors, good conversation with Uncle T.J and Josh, walking, connecting with our friends.  But I could not help but be a little disappointed with Earth Day.  

On our trek over to the Lake, we all could not help but notice trash piled up and polluting one end of the lake. It was disgusting.  Meanwhile, less than half a mile away, we were supposed to be celebrating and advocating for a healthy, clean, sustainable natural environment.  To add to my disappointment, there were vendors upon vendors handing out paper pamphlets and fliers, plastic utensils for the food and drinks.  Then, when we looked to dispose of our trash, there were plenty of trashcans, but no recycling bins?  I believe there was even a booth promoting recycling present at the festival!

No doubt there were plenty of positive things about Earth Day.  There were a lot of really great organizations and individuals promoting good ideas and making the effort to educate and engage people.  I just wish that our Earth Day had taken a more active role in not only evaluating the cost of the festival on the environment, but also utilizing all the people that gathered to clean up the park around them.  If the festival would have organized a clean-up every 30 minutes or so, where everyone was involved in proactively helping the environment, I think it would have had a greater impact on not only people but also the Earth. 

I have spent the morning trying to research the organization that put on San Antonio’s Earth Day.  I hope to make some suggestions on how Earth Day can be more Earth-friendly next year. 

The highlight of the day was meeting the Janssen family, the founders of the Live Lightly Tour.  I had stumbled across her personal blogs just this last week and fell completely in love with this family.  The wife, Sara, promotes green living, her spirituality, anti-consumerism, breastfeeding,  holistic health, attachment parenting, and a commitment to a vegetarian and organic diet to the extreme.  To me, this is what a modern-day hippy looks like (an idea I mean to flesh out in more detail).  I know that if the Janssens lived in San Antonio, we could be good friends J. 

Simple ways Josh and I do Green on a daily basis:

-Recycle.  We have 2 bins: one for the items that the SA  Environmental Services recycles and one for items that are not accepted.  (*Plastics must be cleaned out, and water bottle caps  must be removed)

      -Re-use:  We no longer purchase plastic bags for storing food.  We simply wash out and re-use baggies.  Same thing for shopping bags-  we take our own bags into stores-- not only grocery stores, but retail too;

     -Replace: Skip buying whatever paper products we can.  Instead, we use cloth napkins and rags in place of paper towels 

                      Switch out incandescent bulbs with fluorescent lighting to save energy and reduce greenhouse gases       

     -Compost:  All raw foods and organic material can be thrown into a compost pile and made into organic soil!  

     -Hang-it:  Hang light-weight items, towels, cloth diapers on a line outside to reduce energy

     -Turn it off:  This includes lights and appliances, as well as unplugging electronics, chargers and appliances when not in use (*Even though it may be turned off, simply having it plugged in still uses energy)

     -Garden:  Josh has created our own eco-system in our backyard complete with herbs, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, garlic, peppers, pecan trees, and soon to come: fruit trees.  We know exactly what we are eating, it is seasonal, pesticide-free, reduces cost of transporting goods to local grocer, we get our hands dirty on our land, and it saves money :)

     -Organics:  Josh and I have made a commitment to buy and eat everything organic as possible.  Yes, we do enjoy a meal out once in a while, but anything that finds it's way into our cloth shopping bag is of the earth-- for a sustainable environment and society and a healthy body.