There are a number of choices that we can make in our daily lifestyle — choices
about what we consume, how we handle our waste.
It's not just recycling, but it's also reducing our consumption.
We need to be aware of what we're doing so
that we can change the way we organize our society through our government,
through our — what we purchase, what we do with our time, so that we're advancing
things that are gonna make society more sustainable and not the opposite.
I try to travel light — one suitcase — so every time I get on the airplane,
you know, maybe a little bit less fuel is needed because I'm traveling light.
Individually, the things that we do on a daily basis that adversely
affect the environment include everything from waste to to energy use
and then, of course, as you — as you conserve energy, you can reduce the amount
of pollutants that are emitted from power plants, the amount of CO2 that's
emitted in the atmosphere. Everyone I think needs to take their own approach
to how they can better the environment.
I think it's looking at the
news and some of the science and sort of making your own commitment to sort of
easy as well as hard ways that you can start changing your own behaviors.
Think about your own footprint: It's not just what you buy in the store, but think
literally upstream of the store where those products are coming from and think
about your role in being part of the solution rather than the problem.
Use a reusable bag when you go grocery shopping.
That is like tremendous impact.
I would say, get curious and inform yourself.
When I go to a national park, I don't leave garbage behind because I
know how hard it is for them to get rid of that.
I think one of the first things that anybody could do is sign up and clean up, you know, their communities.
So that is fundamental. We need to start picking up all the stuff that we leave
all over the place, right? The second thing that we can do is plant stuff:
flowers, a tree. Plant a garden that you know can help pollinate, you know, a
lot of vegetables and a lot of gardens, and like, you know, promote those
healthy bee living.
To paraphrase JFK, it's "Ask not what you can do for the environment, but what can we do together." It's only when we do things together as
a family, as a workplace, as an organization, as a neighborhood, as a community, as a
society that we make a difference.
We've worked so hard on getting people to know what it is they can do,
and the most important thing that we can do now to
actually make a difference is to work with others. You can work through your
community group, through a church group, you know, maybe through your work
environment, maybe through a library, but find people
who have similar interests and then work with them
to make a more community-level change.
Probably about nine out of 10 people in the United States never get civically
engaged. They don't go to hearings or meetings or testify or write letters or
call their congressmen or their City Council people. They just go along in
their daily lives without trying to step into the civic arena and express their
opinion and make a difference. So the one out of 10 people who do are the ones
that shape our social organization.
So if you have the time and the willingness
to be that one person out of 10 who gets informed, gets engaged,
you can make a difference. This is one of the things that Earth Day in 1970 taught
some of the original people who were involved — that if you want to make a
difference, you actually can.