Solutions

This image gives a whole new meaning to Green Stamps.  When I was a kid, our parents would be given paper green stamps, when buying groceries, that would allow them to get free stuff when they collect a gazillion.  They had to buy food anyway and when they filled about 6 books of stamps they could get some pretty cool free stuff.  Today these green stamps offer another savings and perhaps more important FREE stuff, like using less gives us more down the road.  I got these stamps from my friend Kurt Lieber who is a musician and an ocean activist. Check out his website http://www.oceandefenders.org/.

I've been blogging for three years now and today, finally, I had the chance to add another feature page to my blog.  It's called Solutions.  Each week I'm going to add another idea from the book Do one Green Thing - written by Mindy Pennybacker.  Change happens when each of us make simple adjustments in what we do whether it's TV shows we watch, things that we buy, food and beverages that we consume, or actions such as recycling or deciding not to throw trash on the ground (including cigarette butts).

Change happens when we make the old way of doing thing obsolete.  By bringing bags to the grocery store makes plastic bags obsolete.  Getting involved in groups that are trying to create change is another way to not only facilitate change, but connect with people that share the same values.  Surfrider, for example, is all about making change while having a good time. So be a part of the solution.  Change a simple habit, join a local chapter of Surfrider or an organization that doesn't have a profit gain as the focal point.  Be a part of something that matters - Change will do ya good.

Bored? Creative Ways to Spend Your Day and Money

Yesterday I attended an event that I would not have known about if it were not for Danielle Richardet,  and Sean Ahlum, Surfrider.  My job at the event called, Life Rolls On, (put on by a consortium of Surfrider, Odysea, and Ocean Cure) was to create a sand sculpture using plastics lift on Wrightsville Beach and kindly picked up by Ginger and John Taylor.  Danielle thought it be a good idea to make it into a foot print as in "What's your plastic footprint?"   

When I got to the beach, I found a carpet of wooden panels that led to the shore line with a parade of enthusiastic, physically challenged, surfers being wheeled to the beach.  Several of them had very little use of any of their limbs.  Ginger, Danielle, and I, along with Danielle's three munchkins, quickly constructed the sculpture and then one by one we took turns going to the shore line.  Tears rolled down cheeks as cheers of joy filled the air while the surfers guided the newfound surfers into the waves and gently rode them into shore.  Smiles everywhere.

I thought to myself, how many of us go shopping when we're bored.  We go to see something new, to find something that makes us feel good about ourselves.  We go meandering aimlessly looking at THINGS that we can buy to look at that may or may not have meaning.  Imagine if instead we looked in the newspaper to see what local groups are doing.  Maybe we could find that something of meaning at local schools or fundraisers for cancer victims.  Maybe we would be so moved by others efforts that we would buy a tee shirt from that event knowing that the money we gave would go toward something bigger than ourselves.  And maybe when we put that tee shirt on, it would take us back to a time and place that held so much more meaning than a shirt that advertises for big businesses like Abercrombie and Fitch, Nike, or Burberry.

Yesterdays tee shirts were $10, not much to pay for something that makes a difference for the things that matter instead funding big business.