Vegetarianism and the Environment

Is it possible that your choice of diet can effect the environment? Having a vegetarian diet can actually have good effects on the environment, but also following the vegetarian lifestyle. Besides having a good effect on your health, finances, and ethics being a vegetarian also helps the environment.

Being a vegetarian you are conserving fossil fuels, according to britishmeat.com, it takes 78 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of beef protein, 35 calories for one calorie of pork, 22 calories for one calorie of poultry as appose to one calorie of fossil fuel for one calorie of soybeans, the difference is great.

Another reason according to britishmeat.com is that "in Brazil and other tropic regions are destroyed daily, in part, to create more acreage to raise livestock" since vegetarians don't eat meat they don't have a demand for livestock.

Pets are friends not food.

Eat your veggies.

Who are you really eating?

Water Rules! Why Shorten your shower

Shower is just a part of our daily hygiene, to keep clean and healthy we must always shower, but we should be efficient about it, and learn how to shorten our shower and save water, money, and energy.

There are some parts of the world were water is very scarce and hard to get to, here in America we should never take for granted our water supply. We should learn to be efficient and shorten our shower to no more than 6 minutes. According to squidoo.com every minute you shorten from your shower saves five gallons of water! The shorter your shower the less you will harm the environment.

You can be just as efficient in showering in less time, just be quick and think of the energy and water and even money you will be saving.

Go Green shorten y our shower time,

Pets Part 2: Why Adopt a Pet Today

There is not quite a joy as when you know you rescued an animal from being euthanized or from being starving from the street. If you are one of the Americans who do not yet have a pet but are looking for one, you might want to consider the choice of adoption from the local animal shelter.

Since many pet owners fail to spay or neuter their pets there is an overflow of pets in the streets who end up getting run over or starve, (see Pets Part 1: Why Spay or Neuter Your Pets). You can be the rescue to these helpless creatures if you make the choice to adopt today.

Most animal shelters euthanize pets who have been there too long, although some animal shelters use other options. When you adopt one of these animals the animal shelter you picked it from will usually spay or neuter your new pet before you bring it home.

These animals are not always mutts, according to the humanesociety.org many of these animals are purebreds. If you choose to adopt you are saving a life. Many of these animals were rescued from the street, saved from being run over or in danger.

 Choose to adopt a new pet today!

Save a life, and adopt a pet!

Make the choice

Get a new family member, and adopt today.

Pets Part 1: Why Spay or Neuter Pets?

Everyone loves animals and more so baby animals, in the U.S alone about 40 percent of Americans own a pet dog and about 33 percent of Americans own a pet cat. With these statistics it would be very wise for pet owners to spay and neuter their pets, but why?

Pets who are not spayed or neutered go about reproducing more and more so there are many animals left who are homeless and without a loving family to care for them, many of these poor animals are killed or go starving. According to the humanesociety.org some states have up to 300,000 homeless animals which end up euthanized in animal shelters each year. Many of these pets who are euthanized aren't just muts but purebreds who become euthanized.

It would be very beneficial to decide to get our pets spayed or neutered. It's the loving thing to do.

We all love baby animals, decided to have your pets spayed or neutered

Be kind to your pets, make the right choice for them

Choose to spay or neuter your pets.

Ozone Hole Reaches Peak

The Antarctic ozone hole has reached a peak September 12, 2011 according to sciencedaily.com. The hole stretched 10.5 million square miles which is the ninth largest in record.

The ozone layer helps protect the planets surface from many things such as harmful rays from the sun or ultraviolet radiation. Environmentalist have been monitoring the Antarctic ozone hole for a while and have found "The upper part of the atmosphere over the South Pole was colder than average this season and that cold air is one of the key ingredients for ozone destruction," said James Butler, director of NOAA's Global Monitoring Division in Boulder.

Many instruments are made to track the hole and its size. According to sciencedaily.com,
"researchers do not expect a smooth, steady recovery of Antarctic ozone, because of natural ups and downs in temperatures and other factors that affect depletion, noted NOAA ESRL scientist Bryan Johnson. Johnson helped co-author a recent NOAA paper that concluded it could take another decade to begin discerning changes in the rates of ozone depletion."

The Antarctic ozone hole.

Think Twice, Recycle! Topic: Newspapers

We come across them everyday, either we get the bargain book every Wednesday, we pick up the college paper, or we get the local newspaper everyday or weekend. Either way, we all come across newspapers sometime or another.

Rather we decided to use them for the dog's corner or clean our cars with them, there are many ways to reuse and recycle newspapers. Most cities have local recycling centers specifically for newspapers, some might even turn in your old papers into cash. Pile up your newspapers till you have enough and them turn them into your local recycling center.

If you have kids of your own it is good to teach them at a small age how to recycle.

Think twice! recycle

These shoes were made out of nenewspaper

There are even decorative ways to recycle newspaper

Rethink! Reuse! Topic: Guitar Strings!

There are many items around our house that we would not think could be reused or recycled, well just think if it could be used once, it can be used again. Many guitarist go through strings very often usually just throwing away the old ones while replacing the new ones.

But there are many ways to reuse guitar stings. According to planetgreen.discovery.com guitar stings can be reused by using them to:
1. Hang pictures on the wall
2. Turn them into jewelry, bracelets, necklaces etc
3. Donations, there are many guitarist in need of stings
4. Arts and crafts
5. to cut fine slices of cheese

So before your guitar strings away, think twice and you might think of more ways to reuse them!

These decorative flowers were once guitar stings

These beautiful bracelets were created by guitar stings

Endangered Species

There have been species that have gone extinct and endangered even before humans knew of their existence. That is a very sad fact that we can destroy something even before we know it existed. By cutting down and destroying these creatures habitats we leave them in much danger and even possibly giving them their death sentence. Many animals live in the trees and forests humans like to cut down.

It is very important we recycle, reuse and reduce our materials being used in order that new ones won't have to  be created and more of our environment in danger. Here is a video of species in which are endangered.

Think Twice, Recycle! Topic: Batteries

Think about it, they are everywhere! Batteries are in our phones, our remote controls, and even our cars! There are proper ways of disposing of them rather than throwing them away in your trashcan. You should make the choice to recycle of these batteries so they may be renewed for someone else to use.

50 percent of the lead supply in the US comes from recycled batteries according to batteryuniversity.com. That is a high percentage. It will only be so if we keep continuing to recycle our old batteries.

There are many places in Brownsville alone that have recycling services for batteries. Some of these places are: Best Buy, Battery Solutions Inc., Staples Corp. and many more. If you want to reach out and make the difference it is not that hard to do.

Never go this far. Always chose to recycle!

Make the choice go green! recycle!

To Reduce or Not to Reduce?

If everyone thought why should I be the one to reduce my waste I'm sure enough people do it anyway it will not matter if I do or don't, then we would have no one reducing their waist and the earth would be in even more of a mess than it is now.

There are very simple easy ways that anyone do to reduce waste and even save some green. Some easy ways to do so according to reduce.org are as simple as packing your own waste-free lunch to school or work with by putting your food into a reusable container that you can always use. Another thing to remember is to only take enough food that you know you will eat.

More ways according to reduce.org that can help us reduce waste for school is by buying school supplies that we can reuse each school year and semester, things such as refillable pens and pencils a durable backpack and lunchbox and binders that we can use over again.

One of the most effective ways to reduce waste and help the trees is by cutting down on paper usage.
 Teachers should start by trying to go green and have students e-mail their work to them if possible. If not teachers and students should always try to recycle paper rather than throwing it away. So many trees don't have to but cut down for paper usage. Always try to buy recycled paper as well.

Using reusable food containers helps reduce waste

Always remember where your paper comes from before you decide to waste it

Go green! Go smart!

Think Twice, Recycle! Topic: Plastic Bottles

It is very convenient when we are on the run to just pick up a plastic bottle rather than keeping around a reusable container. Almost everyone you and I know has had at least one bottle a week. With the population in the U.S. being 310 million that is a lot of plastic bottles we are dealing with.

It takes on average 450 years for a plastic bottle to decompose and break down according to epa.gov. So in our life time the plastic bottle will never be able to decompose, that is unless we recycle. We have to get ourselves into thinking once we are finished using something, not to just toss it out the window or throw it aways. We need to find our local recycling centers and see of what further use we can get out of our materials.

Since the year 1990 about 27 percent more people have been recycling their plastic bottles according to earth911.com. For every one ton of plastic bottles recycled it saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space. Think before you toss, and remember you can make a difference!

Plastic bottles can take on average 450 years to decompose that is longer than four humans lifetime.

Be creative with the way you recycle

Recycle=Life

Alert! Alert! Rainforest Trouble!

There was once a time when the rain forest covered 14 percent of earth's surface, but that time was long gone, now it covers less than half of that, only six percent. What is more sad than that is experts predict that in less than 40 years the last of the rain forest will no longer exist according to rain-tree.com.

 With "one and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries" we are losing the beauty on our planet. Why is earth's beautiful rainforest being killed and chopped down? According to rainforestconcern.org, the top reasons why the rainforest are being cut down and killed are because of cattle ranching, logging, agriculture, mining, oil companies searching for new oil and dams. So many people are after the wealth of the rainforests.

Our rainforests have a lot of value, according to rain-tree.com "more than half of the world's estimated ten million species of plants, animals and insects live in the tropical rainforests. One-fifth of the world's fresh water is in the Amazon Basin." Between every two and a half acres an amazing 750 and 1500 species of trees and plants exist. It is very sad to listen to these facts when one and half acres are lost per second.

What can we do as students? Some good ways are to know how to reduce reuse and recycle all your material such as newspapers, glass, aluminum foil, oil and conserve on gass as much as possible. Even though are rainforest are out of sight to us, always rememeber we are still affected by them and what we do still affects them. The more we use the three R's the more we help save our planets gems, the rainforests.

The killing of a rainforest is an ugly picture

A dead rainforest is no rainforest

Every inch of the rainforest has great beauty

Rainforest are beautiful lets keep it that way