Green Thought Thursdays: Cold Water Washing

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?

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Green Thought Thursdays: Plant Milks

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.

This week the green thought is about plant milks. Milk from cows is great. It has a lot of protein, a good source of vitamins, and has a lot of calcium and other nutrients that are very helpful to staying healthy. However, cows milk has some serious drawbacks. The biggest one is that it means keeping a lot of cows! Raising and maintaining cows requires a lot of resources from space to water to feed. On top of consuming all those resources, the cows themselves release a lot of greenhouse gases. All of this makes cows milk (and really any animal milk) pretty costly for the environment.

Plant milks can come from a range of different plant species and offer excellent alternatives to cows milk. Photo: Science Meets Food.

One solution is offered by plant milks, and since #WorldPlantMilkDay is on August 22 this seems like a great time to discuss these alternatives. Almond milk, oat milk, rice milk, and so many more options are available in most grocery stores, these days. This has not always been the case, but it means that we all have options! Plant milks require a lot fewer resources to produce as compared to animals milks in part because they cut out a huge step. To produce animal milk, plants have to be raised to feed the animal that produces the milk. By simply getting milk from plants, that removes the entire animal step. So, plant milks offer tons of health benefits, cause much less pollution, they eliminate any issue of animal cruelty, and they help reduce a driver of climate change by releasing much less greenhouse gas! All terrific for the human body and the environment! So, lets all go and experiment with the various plant milks and add them into our diets.

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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Green Thought Thursdays: Used Books and Libraries

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.

So, this week the green thought is about books. I LOVE books! I read a lot. My wife reads a lot. our daughter reads a lot. Our house has a lot of books. But printing new books means cutting down trees, using water, and burning fossil fuels to make paper and bind books. Overall, producing one new book can result in around 6 pounds of CO2 gas being released into the atmosphere which means that books have a rather high environmental cost.

Used books and library books (Photo by Aaron N.K. Haiman).

Two solutions are to buy used books and to utilize libraries. Buying a used book means less production of new paper. This means less tree cutting, lower water use, and less energy consumption. All good things. Buying used books is a much more environmentally sensitive choice when compared to buying a new book, but it still means purchasing a book that will go into your personal collection and does still contribute to climate change. Getting a book from a library reduces all the associated costs even more since one library book can be read by a very large number of people, and library collections can help reduce the need for large private collections. Plus, by visiting a library and checking out books, you are helping to show that libraries are valuable resources and should continue to receive public support and funding.

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Green Thought Thursdays: Indoor Cats

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.

So, this week the green thought is about keeping cats indoors. Cats are very efficient and successful hunters. When let out of doors, they can and do kill large numbers of wildlife including approximately 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals each year. Further, domestic cats have directly contributed to the extinction of about 63 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles worldwide. Domestic cats represent a very significant threat to wildlife.

Cats sitting in an enclosure on the side of a house (photo courtesy of digsdigs.com).

A solution is to keep cats indoors. Cats can get plenty of exercise and entertainment inside, and enclosures can be created to allow cats to safely enjoy some sunshine and fresh air. Additional benefits of keeping cats indoor are that cats avoid getting lost, attacked by other animals such as dogs or other cats, and they also being hit by cars!

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Green Thought Thursdays: Low Flow Showers

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.

So, this week the green thought is about how to use less water in the shower. Water requires a lot of energy to pump. It is also a very scarce resource (especially if you live somewhere that experience extreme drought conditions like I am in California). Using a lot of water when we shower uses up a lot of energy, and means burning fossil fuels which are the cause of global climate change. Using a lot of water when we shower also uses a lot of WATER!

Example of a low-flow showerhead in action (photo courtesy of Earth 911).

Two solutions come to mind for this issue. The obvious one is to take shorter showers. We can all challenge ourselves to shorten the time we spend in each shower that we take. Another great solution is to install a low-flow showerhead. These can be found for $10-$20 (and sometimes more) at your local hardware store and they will likely reduce the amount of water used in a shower by around 40%. If we all install low-flow showerheads there will be more water for fish in the rivers, trees in the forests, and in our taps for drinking!

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Waterfowl Declines in California

A flock of Mallards lifting off of a pond. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Each spring since 1948 staff from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife have conducted a survey of central and northeastern California to count the numbers of ducks and geese that are breeding in those areas. These counts are conducted by biologists flying in fixed-wing aircraft over the central and northern parts of California, and they form the basis of the California Breeding Waterfowl Survey. This long term data set is hugely powerful when scientists are looking at long term trends in populations and examining the effects of habitat loss, climate change, human population growth, pollution, and other factors.

Fixed-wing plane used during a breeding waterfowl survey over the Klamath River Basin. Photo: Keith Stein

The 2022 California Breeding Waterfowl Survey was just released and it’s not great. The total number of waterfowl breeding in California has declined 19% since 2019. All species were found to be in decline to some extent. Canada Goose were the least impacted with declines of 5% since 2019. Cinnamon Teal were hit the hardest with declines 54% since 2019. That means that there are only about half as many Cinnamon Teal breeding in California today as there were just four years ago! Mallard (the most common species of duck that breeds in California) and Gadwall were also hit hard with declines of 25% and 31%, respectively, since 2019.

These declines are in large part likely due to poor breeding habitat conditions. Ducks and geese need water to breed. The 2021-22 winter in California had below average precipitation across California, and the snow pack water content in California’s mountains is also below average. Such continued and serious drought conditions are resulting in less water for both natural and managed wetlands, and so to the poor breeding habitats and reducing waterfowl populations found in the survey.

Hopefully more water will fall in the state this coming winter. In the mean time, save water any way you can! The less water we all use, the more will remain in rivers, streams, reservoirs, etc. that can benefit the birds, fish, and other wildlife of California!

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Green Thought Thursdays: Greener Laundry

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.

So, this week the green thought is about how we do our laundry. Water requires a lot of energy to heat up in a washing machine. It also takes a lot of energy to run a dryer to get the water out of our cloths. This energy means burning fossil fuels which are the cause of global climate change. By finding way to use less energy we can all help reduce some of the impacts of climate change. We can also save some money since paying for all that energy can be expensive!

Clean laundry hang-drying (photo courtesy of Lowe’s).

Several solutions are pretty easy on this one! We can wash clothes in cold water. This removes all the energy needed to heat up the water. We can hang-dry our clothes, when we can. This removes all the energy needed to heat up the air and run the dryer. And when we can’t hang-dry our laundry, we can use dryer balls. This reduces the amount of time that a dryer has to run and so reduces the amount of energy needed in the drying process. So, by using less energy on laundry days we can all help address climate change and reduce our household expenses at the same time!

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Green Thought Thursdays: Vegetarian Once a Week

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.

Fruit and vegetables to eat instead of meat (photo courtesy of Times Now News).

So, this week the green thought is about eating less meat. Raising animals as food sources is very costly from the amount of land that is needed to the food and water that the animals require to the pollution that the animals produce (not to mention the pollution from growing the food for the animals) to the energy and materials used to transport and package the meat from those animals. All of those costs make extensive meat eating very impactful on the ecosystems of the world.

A solution is to eat less meat! Even reducing meat consumption by going one full day without meat would make a big difference to the environment. Pick a day (Meatless Mondays have become rather popular) and be a vegetarian for that one day each week (or go vegan if you really want to maximize your impact). Lets all reduce the amount of meat we consume and help to save the planet!

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Green Thought Thursdays: Plastic Water Bottles

Once a week, I am offering up a tip or action or idea that we can all engage with to help reduce waste, use less materials and energy, help conserve species or habitats, and/or generally work towards living in ways that allow for more health and wellbeing for all aspects of the planet.

Plastic water bottle floating in a wetland (photo courtesy of Resource Magazine).

So, this week the green thought is about plastic water bottles. Plastic water bottles require a large amount of resources to create (including quite a bit of water), they are generally only used once, and then many of them end up in landfills or in waterways where they break down into microplastics and cause a whole suite of issues for animals, plants, water pollution, and more. They are a huge waste from start to finish!

A solution is a reusable water bottle! Get a nice one! Decorate it! Remember to bring it with you when you leave home! Most stores, shops, cafes, etc. are happy to use a bottle that you provide. So, lets all stop using disposable water bottles and reduce the amount of plastic waste we humans create!

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Some Black Environmentalists to Learn About

It is Black History Month, and I have been thinking a bit about what I can do as a White scientist, birder, and naturalist, to celebrate the contributions of Black members of these communities. I want to do a small part to lift up the voices of Black environmentalists, climate activists, birders, and naturalists. So, instead of writing a bunch of my own words (and in so doing lifting my own voice instead of the voices of others), I did some poking around online to find Black environmental leaders to draw attention to. Below are links to some lists of Black leaders in the fields of the environmental movement, climate activism, birding, environmental justice, science communication and education, and many other related topics.

These lists are by no means comprehensive, but they include a lot of amazing people doing amazing work. My hope is that you take a few minutes to peruse these lists, and find some individuals who interest you. Learn more about them and the work they are doing. Find organizations they lead or work for and make a donation. Follow them on social media and so support the messages they are working to spread.

So with that, enough from me. Black lives matter. Enjoy!

SF Environment – list of Black environmentalists

GreenPeace – list of 8 Black environmental activists

Solstice – list of 20 Black climate activists

The Wilderness Society – list of 7 Black birders

“This earth is more than worth fighting for.” — Amanda Gorman

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