Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about washing with cold water.
This week the green thought is about mylar balloons.
Mylar balloons pose serious threats to wildlife, soils, and oceans of the world. Photo: Washington Post.
Balloons are fun! They symbolize celebration and happiness! But they are not a celebration for the planet. Mylar is plastic. Balloons frequently escape from parties and drift away. Even when they are placed in the trash, they often escape from landfills. These escaped mylar balloons end up in the water and that is where the problems begin. Many marine animals ingest mylar balloons. Some of them eat balloons intentionally such as sea turtles that eat balloons likely mistaking them for jellyfish. Some of them eat balloons accidently such as baleen whales that swallow balloons along with the krill that they capture in the hundred of gallons of seawater that they take in each mouthful. Even if the mylar balloons are not eaten directly, they break down into microplastics that cause a myriad of problems from polluting soil and water to poisoning microbes to getting into the food that humans eat. Definitely not good!
The solution is: don’t buy mylar balloons. If we all stop buying mylar balloons, fewer and fewer will be produced. This is a great example of how we can all use our wallets to influence industries and push towards the world we want.
What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any other solution ideas?
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Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about reusable coffee cups.
This week the green thought is about washing with cold water.
Washing dishes with cold water can save a lot of energy. Photo: reviewed.com
We all wash clothes. We all wash dishes. All this washing uses water, soaps, and energy. The energy is used to pump water, to run dish washers and washing machines, and to heat the water. And that last part is where we can all easily do a lot better! About 90% of energy used in washing cloths and dishes is used to heat the water. Just to heat the water! Using energy means burning fossil fuels which releases carbon dioxide which contributes to climate change.
An easy solution is to simply wash with cold water! I will admit that washing dishes by hand with cold water is not as comfortable as with warm water. But washing clothes and dishes with cold water works as well as with hot water. And it saves energy which reduces releases of carbon dioxide which avoids climate change.
What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any other solution ideas?
Thank you for visiting my blog! Please check back next week for another Green Thought Thursday!
If you are interested in other ways to connect with me, here are a few options:
Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about voting.
This week the green thought is about reusable coffee cups.
This is not news. We, as a society, use a lot of coffee cups. The disposable coffee cups that we all get when we visit a café or coffee shop are a classic one-use-item. We drink our beverage, and then throw away the cup. Maybe we recycle it. Either way, the USA alone uses, and disposes of, about 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups a year! That is about 5,000 cups a minute! And that is just one country! That is a lot of waste!
A variety of reusable coffee cups. Photo: Bon Appetit
One solution, which is is not innovative or revolutionary, is that we can all bring our reusable coffee mugs with us when we are going out for coffee! Reusable coffee cups are pretty! They are easy to use, and easy to clean. And they could greatly reduce the amount of trash we produce. We just need to remember them when we leave the house.
What do you think of these thoughts and the solution? Is this a step you will take? Do you have any other solution ideas?
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This week, I am attending the Localizing California Waters conference that is being held just outside Yosemite National Park and is organized by a group called Watershed Progressive. It is a great event and I have been learning a lot and meeting some really passionate people in the water world of California.
One of the talks I attended was about beavers and their role in ecosystems and habitat restoration (which is huge!). But one part of that talk was a particularly crazy story that I wanted to share. It is about parachuting beavers! And yes, this is a true story!
As humans expanded into new areas in the 1940s they began to run into beaver conflicts. One growing community in Idaho had a problem with a particular community of beavers that were routinely damaging houses and other property. These humans complained about this beaver community, and eventually it came to the attention of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.
Beavers are native to the western USA, but they had been largely hunted out during the 1700s and 1800s for their fur. Therefore, there were large areas of the Idaho wilderness that had been beaver habitat, but had no beavers. This gave the Idaho Department of Fish and Game an idea for a solution to the human-beaver conflict. Take the beavers, and move them into some remote wilderness areas. But, this raised a problem: how were they going to get beavers into these remote areas? The answer? Drop them out of planes!
Crates, each containing a single beaver, dropped with parachutes into the Idaho Wilderness. Photo: Boise State Public Radio.
That’s right, in 1948, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game constructed a bunch of specially designed crates that would hold a beaver and protect it as it dropped through the air, and then would break open when they hit the ground. The crates also had parachutes attached to them.
A beaver emerging from its opened crate after a parachute-assisted landing. Photo: KTVB 7.
The Idaho Department of Fish and Game then safely trapped the beavers that were causing problem for those humans. The result was a total of 76 captured beavers. These beavers were loaded into the specially designed crates, the crates were loaded on to planes, the planes were flown out over remote areas of the Idaho wilderness, and then the crates with their beaver passengers were dropped out of the planes and allowed to float down to the ground below! The first beaver to be dropped in such a manner was named Geronimo, and he and the rest of his beaver companions all but one survived their skydiving experience, and, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, went on to live their beaver-y lives.
I found this story to be so hilarious and absurd! Such a huge amount of effort to protect the property of a small group of humans that had moved into an area where the beavers were already living!
I am glad that the Idaho Department of Fish and Game decided to move the beavers instead of kill them, and I will say that the beavers probably ended up in a pretty good place, far from humans and in areas that were likely to make for good beaver homes. Since the beaver had been so decimated by over hunting, these beavers may have helped recolonize some of their former range.
The story gets crazier because in the 1950s, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife decided to emulate Idaho and also air dropped beavers into remote areas of wilderness. In California, the reason for parachuting beavers into the wilderness had nothing to do with beaver-human conflicts, but instead was to help reintroduce beavers to their historic range
So, all in all, a good story. But still a hilarious and absurd one as well.
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Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet. Last week we talked about pumpkins.
This week the green thought is about voting.
So many candidates, measures, propositions, etc. appear on ballots! How do we all decide where to cast our votes? Candidates have a range of opinions when it comes to science and the environment. Measures and propositions also represent a range of impacts in terms of science and the environment. These various individuals and pieces of potential legislation can have huge impacts on our world depending on which are supported and allowed to hold power.
Voting can send a strong message that science and the environment are important issues. Photo: ACLU
So, vote green! We can all make sure that the candidates we vote for have strong science, environmental, ecological, sustainable priorities. This will help to make those priorities realities at all levels of government from city councils to the President of the United States (though that office in not on the ballot this November). We can also make sure that the measures and propositions we vote to support will also support science and the environment. By helping to elect science-minded candidates, and pass science-focused legislation, we can all show that these are important priorities to “we the people” and make the world a more sustainable place for ourselves and future generations.
What do you think of these thoughts and the solution? Is this a step you will take? Do you have any other solution ideas?
Thank you for visiting my blog! Please check back next week for another Green Thought Thursday!
If you are interested in other ways to connect with me, here are a few options:
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