1 post tagged “earth day”
I hope you had a happy and meaningful Earth Day! We celebrated as a family by helping a group clean a park. It was a glorious day to be outside and the kids loved playing in the water discovering all kinds of things like really cool fossils and lots of trash! We won an award for the most interesting trash - someone's credit card that expired in 1978! I also found a roll of film that had been exposed and was quite weathered, we found where someone had dumped a whole load of bricks into the creek and even a whole bunch of plastic leaves were scattered about! But the biggest thing that we found is what ties my Earth Day experience into the realm of saving animals. We found tons of rusting metal things and plastic!
A couple of the kids helping out found things like an old tire and a cell phone in the water, one found an old rusty hubcap. All of those things contaminate the water for the wildlife that depend on it as a drinking source. But the plastic is what really does the damage. I couldn't begin to count the number of plastic bags that we found! Some animals end up ingesting it and it can block their intestines. Other animals get wrapped up in the plastic and suffocate or are greatly impaired by carrying the plastic around for a long time. I saw a picture of a turtle who had gotten a six-pack holder around his middle and his shell grew around it as if he was wearing a tight belt.
I really hope that everyone will stop to reflect about what Earth Day means. To me it is leaving as little impact on my environment as possible and to make careful choices. Our society has gotten to be so numb to things being disposable, is it any wonder that they feel like they can just chuck out their pets when they tire of them? Why can't you upgrade to the newest kittens each spring just like the new mobile phones?
Do your part for the planet that we live on. When you think about recycling, include pets into that philosophy. Adopt, don't shop and adopt for life. Now that we're all doing the right thing by the pets, don't forget to use resources wisely - like don't waste water and electricity and make sure that you fill that recycling bin each week! I come from a state where it is illegal to put recycleable materials into a landfill and so it shocks me how few people recycle in this state. It's so easy and once it become habit, it's so effortless and you'll be amazed at the volume of trash you can keep out of a landfill. It makes me very happy to think about all the plastic things that can be recycled so that we don't have to always start with raw materials!
If you won't do it for yourself, make the world a better place for your pets!
