Eco Links

Environmental Action: Steps You Can Take
(from the Environmental Defense Fund)

Recycle, as much as possible, newspapers, glass, plastic, aluminum, and batteries.
Conserve energy, use energy efficient lighting, and ask your utility company to use renewable energy.
Find an alternative to chemical pesticides for your lawn and buy organic produce when possible to reduce pesticide use in farming.
Purchase only those brands of tuna marked “dolphin safe.”
Organize a community group to clean up a local stream, highway, park, or beach.
Use public transportation whenever possible and when driving , try to carpool.
Visit and help support our parks.
Help teach young people about the beauties of the natural world.
Educate yourself on environmental concerns and know how your elected officials stand on these issues.

Links to environmental websites:

What is sustainability?

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In ecology the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. For humans, sustainability is the potential for long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions.

Healthy ecosystems and environments provide vital goods and services to humans and other organisms. There are two major ways of reducing negative human impact and enhancing ecosystem services and the first of these is environmental management. This approach is based largely on information gained from earth science, environmental science and conservation biology. The second approach is management of human consumption of resources, which is based largely on information gained from economics.

Sustainability interfaces with economics through the social and ecological consequences of economic activity. Sustainability economics involves ecological economics where social, cultural, health-related and monetary/financial aspects are integrated. Moving towards sustainability is also a social challenge that entails international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyles and ethical consumerism. Ways of living more sustainably can take many forms from reorganising living conditions (e.g., ecovillages, eco-municipalities and sustainable cities), reappraising economic sectors (permaculture, green building, sustainable agriculture), or work practices (sustainable architecture), using science to develop new technologies (green technologies, renewable energy and sustainable Fission and Fusion power), to adjustments in individual lifestyles that conserve natural resources.

What is sustainable living?

Sustainable living is a lifestyle that attempts to reduce an individual’s or society’s use of the Earth’s natural resources and personal resources.[1] Practitioners of sustainable living often attempt to reduce their carbon footprint by altering methods of transportation, energy consumption, and diet.[2] Proponents of sustainable living aim to conduct their lives in ways that are consistent with sustainability, in natural balance and respectful of humanity’s symbiotic relationship with the Earth’s natural ecology and cycles.[3] The practice and general philosophy of ecological living is highly interrelated with the overall principles of sustainable development.