Happy Earth Day!!
It is important to be environmentally sustainable everyday, not just earth day, but it’s like making new years resolutions: a good time to evaluate your life and make changes. Some aspects to think about:
Transportation: walk, bike, use public transport, or carpool when possible
Diet: You don’t have to become a vegan, but make sustainable choices by eating less animal products. Also for seafood use the Monterey Bay seafood watch to choose sustainably harvested food: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/
Reduce/ reuse/ recycle: I like to emphasize reduce and reuse. Using what you already own, and repurposing second hand good is much more sustainable than going out and buying new products: even “earth friendly” ones. And recycle.
VOTE: climate change is deadly serious and deadly urgent. It will never get better without individual actions and a culture change towards sustainability. But individual sustainable actions will also never be enough. Urgent and extreme systematic changes are needed at the global scale to minimize the already occurring large scale damage due to climate change.
It is easy to feel like your actions and your vote don’t matter because the government is corrupt and gerrymandered and answers to corporations’ interests rather than the people’s. But try not to succumb to climate despair and doomsdayism. Despair breeds hopelessness and complacency and allows for individuals to gut our shared home for their own monetary gain. Do not give up on our resilient, living earth that needs our care and protection and action. So use your reusable grocery bag, vote, participate in protest and boycotts and education, and perhaps revolution.
