Our Environment

When I write about saving our environment, I often cover the grander, more “high falutin” topics ranging from reasons to stop deforestation right through residential wind turbines.

Fact is, to really play a part in the solution to our environmental problems we all need to contribute something personally. Now don’t get me wrong., I am not putting my hand out here, quite the opposite.

I want to help you save a few dollars as well as helping save our environment.

What I am getting at is to save our environment we all need to be doing something, anything on a regular basis that moves us towards a solution to our environmental problems and towards saving our environment.

To demonstrate this today I want to tell you al little about worm farms. WORM FARMS I can hear your say, “Has Jamie flipped his environmentally conscience wig”? Well not quite.

Saving our environment can be as easy as using a worm farm

Worm farms are no longer the tool of the environmentally aware farmer or avid suburban gardener.

The truth is more and more apartment dwelling people are using worm farms on their balcony’s as part of a sustainable system for growing their own vegetables and making their own compost.

Once establish, even a modest size worm farm will devour and convert a great deal of your non toxic kitchen waste, turning it into a very environmentally friendly and high quality compost.

This by product of your worms helping you to reduce the amount of garbage you produce (called castings), will have a very positive and beneficial effect on just about anything you want to grow – anywhere. Even if its in a pot overlooking a busy street ten stories from the sidewalk.

Worms are astonishing little beasts. They will eat most of your kitchen waste and turn it into a premium quality fertilizer (worm castings), which can be easily added to your garden soil, your potted veggies or most indoor plants.

The things your worms can eat and convert into fertiliser (once established) is absolutely incredible. To give you an idea of what is on the worm menu, they will eat food and most other kitchen scraps without a second thought. They also love paper scaps, pet hair and even vacuum cleaner dust – yuck! And they turn it all into a highly beneficial compost for your garden.

Worm farms can be as simple or as elaborate as you like. They are not expensive to own and will, over time, more than pay for themselves.

They will save you money on organic fertilizer, they will reduce your environmental footprint by reducing the amount of garbage you throw away (a very big plus for saving our environment). And you will benefit both health wise and financially by growing your own vegetables, not to mention bragging rights at your next dinner party.

Some types of worms you can own are Tiger worms, Indian Blues or the popular Red Wriggler (sounds like a Spiderman nemesis to me!).

Your worm farm can be compact enough for the smallest courtyard or shady balcony. And they can also be a great project for the kids.

Your worm farm can help teach them valuable lessons about how simple saving the environment can be, as well as demonstrating how we can all play a part in saving our environment.

Thanks for reading

Jamie – The Our-Environment Team

10 Easy Ways to Save Our Environment

All of us theses days should be conscience of simple ways to save our environment. To save the environment doesn’t necessarily mean marching down the high street waving a placard and chanting a environmental protest mantra.

Saving our Environment means making small changes to the way we live our lives. The changes do not have to be dramatic, they don’t even have to be cool! All we have to do is focus on ways that you and I waste power, and create waste without really taking any notice of it – and change it.

At the time of writing there were over 286,000 places online that will give you a list of the easiest am most effective things you can do personally to help save our environment.

I have waded through the best of these articles and put together my own “Ways to Save Our Environment Top Ten List” (thanks Letterman!). These recommendations I hope are ones that you may have not heard before, or even if they are, perhaps ways to save our environment you may not have implemented yet, they are;

Top Ten List – Ways to Save Our Environment

1. Turn the switch off – If you see that your mobile phone, computer, the television (or any other electrical device) is switched on but no one is using it, turn it off.
2. Only use Plantation Timber – Old growth and Natural forest harvesting makes up over 25% of the cause of carbon emissions on the planet (that’s a lot). When you use paper or even buy furniture make certain the timber/wood used is either plantation grown or recycled.
3. Turn off the tap while brushing your teeth. – If ten more people every day turn off the tap while brushing, the water saved in just one year will total 6,679,500 litres. That’s about three Olympic sized pools full of water saved.
4. Fill up a bottle of water and put it in your toilet cistern – This automatically saves water when the toilet is flushed. Don’t laugh, this works a treat. The best part is you only have to do it once and never think about it again.
5. Fill the kettle only with the amount of water you need – This will also use a lot less energy. How many of us fill the jug when only making one or to cups? A bonus of this Save Our Environment tip is you won’t have to wait as long for your cup of tea or coffee either.
6. Plant your own vegetable garden – This is not only good for our environment, it’s great for your health. You will enjoy harvesting and eating the fruit of your labour, and trust me they taste better than anything you will find at the Supermarket. Growing your own vegetables will also help young people in your life understand interdependence between ourselves and our environment.
7. Carpool! – If people you work with live nearby destination take turns driving. It is a better way to start the day than just listening to the traffic report.
8. Place lighting in the corners of the room – They reflect more light from the corners than do if they are located centrally or along a wall.
9. Use power strips or Power boards ( the ones with several electrical outlets on them). These are actually a more efficient way of running electronic appliances rather than each appliance in its own socket. This saves you a lot of energy and a few dollars to boot.
10. When buying a computer consider a laptop – A laptop consumes up to 90 percent less energy than a desktop computer and you can save even more energy by running on your batteries alone as much as possible.

I hope there are a few ways listed here to save out environment you may not have seen before.

If you have any other ways to help save our environment you would like to share, please leave a comment. I would love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading.

Jamie – The Our Environment Team

Please feel free to use and republish this information, all we as in return is you have a link back to us here at Our-Environment.com – A privately funded initiative to help raise awareness about saving our environment.

Here at Our-Environment.com we are passionate about the Earth and helping to create a better, sustainable environment for ourselves and our descendants.

Environment Vinyl Banner

We are not “tree huggers” we do not want to move back to the stone age, we believe that there are solutions available and available now. Sure there are costs to consider, though the price of ignoring the impact we as a species we have on the environment is even more costly.

Helping us achieve our goals are our sponsors. Our-Environment.com’s major sponsor since the beginning has been Steve Scott (the vinyl banner guy) from B2bJv.com, Steve has helped us in many ways, financially by helping keep our website alive and also by designing and supplying some great vinyl banners for us that we have used to promote the cause.

Here in this article is an example of one of our banners Steve’s created for us. Thanks Mate we all appreciate all your support.

Jamie & The Team at Our-Environment.com

I think it’s important to keep a positive mental attitude in our lives as much as we can. It’s good for us, good for people around us, it makes the world a better place.

That said there are some things that leave me…. peeved. Not angry, not upset, not hostile just peeved.

Greenhouse Effect - To Be or Not to Be - No Question

The thing that triggers this response in me most readily is comments and belief that Climate Change is a natural phenomenon. That Global Warming is just part of the cycle the Earth goes through, and that no human activity could possibly cause any impact on the larger environment.

Are the people who believe this BS from another planet? Are they consultants for the oil companies and the coal mining lobby? Or does this fall into the basket of someone else’s problem, and let’s just pretend that Climate Change through human activity does not exist. The Ostrich Syndrome…

Last time I checked, the levels of Carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere every day was a staggering 70 million tonnes – each day. Now I don’t care what cultural background you have, or what level of schooling you have enjoyed. But in my humble opinion 70 million tonnes is a lot of anything, let alone a known greenhouse causing gas that we are pumping into the air we breathe every 24 hours.

One favourite pastime of mine is astronomy, I am an amateur astronomer (very amateur) and enjoyed looking into the heavens and dreaming of what’s out there since I was a small boy. So as such I have a fundamental understanding of the nature and composition on the planets in our solar system. Of course where this fits in to this particular comment is the planet Venus, a classic case on runaway greenhouse effect.

The surface temperature of Venus is about 400 °C (or around 800 °F), so what is my point? I am no scientist so let’s have a quote from Bill Arnett (University of Arizona), and I quote.

“The dense atmosphere of Venus (primarily CO2) produces a run-away greenhouse effect that raises Venus’ surface temperature by about 400 degrees to over 740 K (hot enough to melt lead). Venus’ surface is actually hotter than Mercury’s despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun.”

Venus’ surface is actually hotter than Mercury’s despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun, interesting don’t you think. Why… the CO2.

Thousands of millennia ago the Earth had a carbon loaded atmosphere akin to that of Venus, the temperature unbearable by today’s standards and the atmospheric pressure over 100 times what we enjoy today (equivalent of being about a mile under water).

Over an age through natural processes (including photosynthesis), this carbon was pulled from the atmosphere sequestered into the Earth largely in the form of fossil fuels, oil and coal.

This occurred about almost 3 billion years ago when a microbe called Cyanobacteria (one of the first form of life on Earth) came into being. Cyanobacteria were the first oxygen-producing phototropic organisms, and they slowly sucked in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release the oxygen you and I need to breathe.

This process took a long time, about 500 million years. It happened during the early Paleoproterozoic age. These microbes converted the Earth’s atmosphere from an anoxic (or oxygen-poor) atmosphere into an oxic (oxygen rich) condition.

The problem now is that we are undoing all the good work that the microbe Cyanobacteria did for us. By burning coal and oil and releasing the CO2 back into our atmosphere we are turning back the clock in a way that will eventually lead to an obvious result – the Greenhouse effect.

You and I may not be here to see the Greenhouse effect here on Earth at its worst, though if thing keep going the way they are – out of control – No One Will Be Here To See It….

Food for thought, what are you doing about it today?

Recommended Resource

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-history-of-the-earths-atmosphere.htm

Peeved

Jamie

It is a little known fact that one of the major contributors of carbon emissions into the atmosphere is deforestation. If we could stop deforestation today, we would effectively eliminate the number two man made cause of carbon emissions.The United Nations declared that deforestation accounts for around 25 percent of all emissions of carbon dioxide as a result of human activity. This is roughly the same amount of carbon discharged by the United States each year, the world’s largest polluter.

Over 30 billion tonnes of carbon in the form of CO2 is predicted will be released into the atmosphere this year (2009). It is estimated that this will continue to increase to a staggering 33.1 billion tonnes by 2015.

Deforestation Causes 25% of all Man Made CO2 Emissions

Of the estimated 30 billion tonnes of carbon discharge this year, the felling of trees in Brazilian forests, old growth forests in Asia and in Africa will contribute over 2 billion tonnes. That is unless we start acting now to actually stop deforestation.

The World’s forests harbour a total of approximately 280 gigatonnes of carbon in their biomass. The total amount of carbon stored in forests including their biomass, fallen timber and debris, leaf litter and the soil in which the forests grow is estimated to be one trillion tonnes. This represents almost twice the amount of carbon already present in our atmosphere today.

Is the Answer to The Problem Plantation Grown Timber?

I think yes. Let’s look at the basic forest cycle. Trees like all plants use carbon dioxide as a food source. CO2 combined with sun light and water by means of photosynthesis, converting CO2 into carbohydrates for nourishment and oxygen which is released as a by product.

Planting renewable forests is beneficial in two main ways, firstly new trees will leech CO2 out of the atmosphere, secondly oxygen as we have already said is a by product released by photosynthesis. The new trees will keep the carbon dioxide contained for the life of the plant.

The only trouble with plantation timber being when trees die or indeed are harvested for our use, the original carbon dioxide is released and our CO2 discharge increases with it. As I write today globally we fell many more trees than we are replanting and replacing.

This means that more CO2 is being released than is being captured by the plants and trees photosynthetic processes, leading to our carbon emissions accelerating.

By planting new trees at the same (or indeed a faster) rate than we are consuming the forest resources, we reduce our carbon output by 25%, that’s 7.5 billion tonnes per year at current levels, a huge decrease in CO2 emissions that can be achieve with very little penalty at all.

Plantation Forests May Be the Answer

So are there good reasons to stop deforestation? I believe the answer is self evident. By putting a halt to the felling of old growth forests and replacing our timber consumption with plantation grown trees, and replacing them at an equal or better rate than our prevailing timber appetite, we can put a halt on the second the biggest contributor of man made CO2 emissions that exists today.

We can still use timber for construction, we can enjoy its warmth and beauty in furniture and around our homes. We can stop deforestation without any negative impact on our lives at all. How can we work together to help stop deforestation once and for all?

What do you think?