Love the Earth. Treat it Well!

A Peaceful Place

Our school has a beautiful water garden right outside my classroom window. My students love watching the goldfish as the swim in the pond and the butterflies and birds that come by to visit this peaceful place.

Recycling Cardboard Boxes

Does anyone know how we could make some money for our school with the boxes we recycle each day?

Americans produce more than a third of the world's garbage:4.5 pounds of trash per person every day. More than half of it ends up in landfills, where it emits methane, a greenhouse gas-more than any other source. Eventually, those landfills leak toxic materials into the surrounding soil and water.

Good Use for Junk Mail

I cut off my name and address from the tons of junk mail that I get and use it as return address labels for bills and other letters I send out. It works out and then I recycle the rest of that junk mail for, I suppose, more junk mail!!!!!

Fog Catchers

Fog Catchers Bring Water to Parched Villages

When people from rural Peru move to Lima, the capital, they're looking for a better life. But things can be tough.

It's hard to find a job in the city. The jobs they can get—bus driver, street vendor, construction worker—don't pay well.
And the cheapest area to live is high on steep hills on the edge of the city, where landslides are common and water is scarce.

German conservationists and biologists Kai Tiedemann and Anne Lummerich, who run Alimón, a small nonprofit that supports Latin American development, are trying to help with the last of those problems. Since 2006 they've been working with new settlements on the outskirts of Lima to set up special nets that scoop water directly from the air.

(See pictures of the fog-catching nets in Peru.)

Rain rarely falls on these dry hills. The annual precipitation in Lima is about half an inch (1.5 centimeters), and the city gets its water from far-off Andean lakes.

But every winter, from June to November, dense fog sweeps in from the Pacific Ocean.

With a few thousand dollars and some volunteer labor, a village can set up fog-collecting nets that gather hundreds of gallons of water a day—without a single drop of rain falling.
Ancient Technique, Modern Salvation?

As far back as 2,000 years ago, desert villages and other rain-starved communities around the world may have started harvesting fog that collected as water and dripped from trees, said Robert Schemenauer, executive director of FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit organization that helps communities set up simple collection devices.

Serious work on collecting fog started about a hundred years ago. Since then, fog catchers have been used successfully—though on a small scale—all over the world.

Chacos

My kids got me this cool pair of Chaco sandals for Christmas and I've worn them like crazy all summer long. I just today had the time to sit down and look through the catalog that came in the box and I was impressed with what this company is doing to improve our environment. They pay their employees to ride their bikes to work, volunteer their time and advance their educations. They use recycled paper for all their print materials, used recycled rubber outsoles to their sandals and shoes and they are planting thousands of trees each year. Not only are they doing their part, these sandals are just incredibly comfortable. If the sandals tear up they can repair them therefore saving them from being dumped in a landfill. I love my Chacos!!!!