Toasting Earth Day in an Earth Day Mug?

Searching for "Earth Day Merchandise" brought up thousands of commercial hits on Google: t-shirts, hats, mugs, etc. Some of this is arguably for the better - if you replace your throwaway cup with a mug you bring to your favorite coffee shop each and every time, you will undoubtably be helping the planet. Americans throw away a staggering 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups every ear. Even 500 years from now, a foam coffee cup used this morning will be sitting in a landfill somewhere. And Earth Day cloth bags, if used regularly, will keep tons of plastic or paper bags out of our resource use and waste stream. But a lot of the Earth Day merchandise is simply more stuff we don't need (and don't need to manufacture, ship, advertise, etc.), and it promotes the idea that for any occasion we should be buying stuff. The folks at the Huffington Post have a great article about Earth Day Marketing to kids. Check it out!

Never Thought I'd Say This But....

...I'm going to recommend a Reality TV Show. Wow, this is really a first. However, ABC's reality show "Wife Swap" has a local environmentalist/unschooler/and just plain cool person on this week. She was Asa's violin teacher for years and if any environmentalist could walk into an overconsuming American's home (let alone one who thinks junk food is "more nutritious" and has 5 cars, all of them SUVs and big trucks) and handle it with grace and aplomb, it's Melanie. We watched it tonight and my kids were really jazzed to see the show and were cheering her on (as she installs a bidet and forbids them to use toilet paper and asks them to sell an SUV, LOL) and we were all happy that the producers seemed to play it pretty even-handedly and let the people speak for themselves. The other mom was, well, just not very nice. At all. And not very happy. And prefers her dogs to interacting with other people, including her husband and son. So their situations really did speak for themselves.

I thought Melanie and her partner Rob and son Skye did an excellent job of repeatedly bringing up the reasons for their lifestyle choices in a mostly respectful manner. On many stations it airs on Wednesday night, so heads up if you want to catch a little bit of environmentalism invading ABC's prime time!

The Power of Change

The kids and I went on a walk next to a big park by the river here. Halfway up the trail we heard this screeching from the top of a tree. When we came out on top of the little butte, we saw this: an eagle's nest, and the screeching was from a baby eagle inside! There is a pair of nesting bald eagles, less than a mile from downtown in our city.

Sometimes as an environmentalist, it is easy to become hopeless, but when I was looking at that eagle's nest it got me thinking about how things can change. Many people worked together to protect the bald eagle and bring it back from the endangered brink of extinction. And now today we can hear baby bald eagles practically on our doorstep and see their parents soaring over the playground at a local park on their way to catching fish in the river.