Friday, April 22, 2011 is Earth Day.

A day of awareness set aside.  A day for you, your family, friends, co-workers, neighbors and your community to review your recycling habits.  Are you doing everything you can to reduce the landfills and keep our rivers and oceans clean?  Has recycling become a daily habit for you and your family?  Are you teaching yourself, family members, neighbors the benefits of recycling?  What are you doing?  Do you say you will do something about it tomorrow because you are too busy today?

I know these are tough questions.  I know you must be tired and doing one more thing can seem to be too much to ask.  But if we don’t do something about our environment now, things will change for the worse whether you like it or not.  Our air will make us more ill than we already are at this moment.  Our rivers and oceans are not only unsightly, they are polluted and have toxic chemicals from which our fish and wildlife drink.  Where does your drinking water come from?  You may think that our tap water is safe to drink.  How does it smell to you?  How does it taste?  Isn’t that just one reason why bottled water has increased in sales?  Well… what we thought was a good idea years ago, may not be after all.  We all forgot about our environment, our landfills and our rivers and oceans because of the day to day hustle bustle.  Johnny needs to go to soccer practice, Sally has her ballet lessons, you work 50 hours a week, your husband travels and you know the story.  All of those things won’t matter if one day you turn on your tv set and the news tells you to stay indoors because the air is so toxic you could become quite ill.  Or what if you hear on the tv that you can’t drink the water because of toxic pollution.  Well…those days are closer than you think.  Now we need to ask one more tough question.  What are you going to do to help your community NOW?  Not tomorrow…not some day…NOW.  Because that’s all we have is NOW.

Here are some suggestions to help you be a NOW person.

*  Starting this month, invite your neighbors to a gathering, a BBQ, a block party and theme your party…TRASH PARTY.  Have an agenda.  Involve everyone because it effects everyone…kids of all ages, Grandma & Grandpa, Aunts & Uncles.  Whomever wants to learn what they can do to create a better life for all.  Invite speakers.  Now those speakers could be your very neighbors who can share their ideas and what they are doing to create less trash.  We learn from others and we learn in a fun environment.  The topic is serious, but you add the fun.

*  Have a family meeting.  Decide what you and the members of your household can do to create less trash.  Make it a point to talk about recycling every day.

*  Look at a bag of trash you have now.  Put a piece of plastic down on your yard and empty out the trash bag.  Examine the bag and see where you can improve.  Can you recycle, compost, reuse?  Then get yourself organized and set up your new system.  Do it now and have some fun!

Here are some links to help you organize your new life-style and have fun!

http://earthday2011.org/earth-day-2011-celebrate-earth-day-everyday

http://wilderness.org/content/what-are-you-doing-earth-day?gclid=CPb7k_SL8qcCFcK77QodqGVBcA