Blog Action Day Spotlights The Environment

Today is the inaugural Blog Action Day and bloggers are being asked to either write a blog post about the environment or donate today's blog site earnings to an environmental or eco-friendly charity of their choice.

This blog doesn't earn any money (yet) so I'll take a view moments to post about the environment and the goal that Cindy and I have of building an environmentally-friendly home in the mountains of North Carolina.

As a side note, our real estate agent Kelley e-mailed us today to let us know that the Health Department approved the relocation of our future home, so we will be closing this week on the property. We, of course, are very happy (Jeff does cartwheels across the floor and slams into the bookcase).


I came to the conclusion a while back that, while there was nothing I could do about our President's horrible philosophy and actions regarding our environment, there were plenty of things that I, and you and I, could do in our own little part of the world. Perhaps, if enough of us do everything that we can as individuals, we can slow the headlong rush toward eco-disaster into which we are plunging.

Although we have planned to build an eco-friendly home in North Carolina since we first started talking about moving there one day, now that we are one step closer and have purchased property to build on, we plan to redouble our efforts to find every way possible for us to have as little impact as possible, both initially during construction and through the rest of lives there (we don't plan to live anywhere else after moving there in 4-5 years) on the beautiful piece of land we'll be sharing with nature.


We have been and will continue to spend a lot of time investigating the most environmentally safe ways to build and maintain our home. We're hoping to find ways to use natural insulation, solar power, water power and perhaps even wind power in as many aspects of building and living that we can. We plan to drop down to one vehicle when we move there, because it will have to be a powerful 4-wheel drive truck in order to get up and down the mountain roads. I'm hoping that going from a 2 vehicle home will balance, or even hopefully lessen, the impact of using the kind of truck we'll need up there.

But we're not waiting until we move to NC to try and be "green." We're already been taking steps to be as conscious of the environment as we can. No more plastic cups or plates (to reduce the need to run the dishwasher) are being bought. Those items will now be paper, which is biodegradable. We've long participated in our city's recycling program by batching newspapers and magazines and plastic into recycling tubs. Speaking of magazines and newspapers; if a publication that I enjoy offers an online subscription I'll choose that option instead of a dead-tree product. We try to reduce the number of laundry loads we do (without being aromatically offensive to those around us, lol) and air-dry as much as we are able. I've even been trying to get myself in the habit of taking the cloth bags we bought for shopping when I go to the grocery store, so we don't have to use the ubiquitous "paper or plastic" bags that are offered.

Will what we do change the world? No, at least not in a definable way. But if all of us do whatever we can, we can help make the world our children and grandchildren inherit just a little bit better. And who knows...we might just be the turning point in the environmental health of our world.

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