Over the past year and a half we have really upped our Green Living Goals around our home and to that end we made sure that over and above our regular projects we actively sought some sort of larger scale green project to get involved with. We dipped into a number of projects, we volunteered all over the show and quite a few the projects we joined resonated with us and we stuck with them, others we learnt so much we are still processing them.
From Our Home to the World
Our goal was really to look at how changes that we make in our home can spread to our community, and from our community out into the world at large. For example, every time we step out onto the beach, and we do that a lot, before we play doing a mini beach cleanup… and that led us to joining a monthly beach-cleanup project in our community, which led onto thinking about the global problem of ocean trash… raising awareness became a growing concern for us.
Our intention was to blog about our journey, but it turned into a much bigger project than we anticipated… so today, Earth Day, it is a good day to launch a series and we are going to bring you our interviews over the next couple of weeks. For our projects we visited folk and worked with amazing influential people, who work on environmentally interesting, thought provoking projects. We have planted trees, we have climbed mountains, we have snacked on seaweed and done beach cleanups, to name a few. As we went on our journey of learning we interviewed a number of environmentalists… scientists, researchers, conservationists, activists and so on. We asked everyone we interviewed three leading questions.
The Three Questions
- What one thing do you do in your home that you feel makes a difference to the environment?
- If you could tell your community one thing to change what would it be?
- If you had an opportunity to speak to world leaders what policy would you ask them to implement?
We take small positive steps towards change, and when we make a change we stick with it. Little steps towards green living are much easier to implement one by one… and you might not even notice the incremental differences… but over time you are making a bigger and bigger impact.
Get outdoors and enjoy your environment… you can only care for what you love. While you are outdoors could folk please stop littering… all that rubbish ultimately ends up in the ocean. Someone has to clean it up. I think if we could have a lot more anti-littering education it would go a long way to folk caring for their immediate environment.
Lose the plastic. Could we just stop plastic production and find viable alternatives. We cannot even begin to comprehend the extent to which our plastic consumption is destroying our planet… if we just stopped making it then we could at least press pause on the mountains of garbage that we are creating.
By asking the big questions: How do the little things we do affect our local community really, and how does that roll out to the world at large… we found that it really helped us to keep on making small changes… one step at a time. Some of the things that we really thought would be difficult to change weren’t that much of a problem after all. For example, we put off using plastic wrap for the longest time, and yet when we stopped buying it and it ran out, I discovered that we were only using it because it was there, it isn’t available in our home anymore and we just don’t miss it.
Have a little think about these questions… how would you answer them. We Would love if you could leave a comment… And we will begin presenting our interviews to you this time next week… same time, same place…
You wouldn’t realise but you have really challenged me to look at our plastic consumption. since your post on shopping bags we have begun taking the cloth bags, our plastic consumption is reducing!! Usually we don’t use gladwrap but put food straight into their glass containers (with lids) but maybe that’s our next thing to tackle
Hay Erin, so good to hear our post resonated with you… This is quite a journey to green living. Honestly I never expected that giving up plastic wrap would be this easy… I just stopped buying it and every time I reach for it I just have to think of an alternative. But this is a definitely a journey, because one change leads to another, leads to another… Thank you so much for stopping by, hope you have a lovely weekend!!!