Make Every Day Earth Day

Happy Thursday Revolutionaries.  Tomorrow, Friday April 22nd is not only Good Friday, it’s also Earth Day 2011. 

What activities do you have planned with your kids to commemorate?  Although there are a lot of activities going on here in Seattle in conjunction with Earth Day, The SeattleDad household will unfortunately not be participating in any of them.  That’s because, as I suspect a lot of you also do, Mrs. LIAYF and I have to work tomorrow. 

I haven’t heard yet, but I am pretty certain that our son’s pre-school will have a full slate of Earth Day activities on the schedule, and when we get him home we will most likely focus our evening conversation on what the significance of the day means.  Thankfully, it won’t be a foreign topic for our little guy.  That’s because my wife and I do our best to work conservation into our daily family routine.  In essence, we try to make every day around here an earth friendly day.

Now don’t get me wrong.  We are by no means the cliched Seattle family of tree hugging, Prius driving, green hippies who go out of our way to make sure everyone knows we are children of Mother Gaia.  On the contrary, we are just a family who has tried to work sound conservation practices into our daily routines.  We want conserving limited resources to be as natural a concept to our children as getting up in the morning (they both take little extra effort but need to be done).  How exactly do we do this?  Well, just like many of you do I suspect. 

We compost our food waste and yard clippings, separate out recyclables from our trash, turn off lights when we aren’t using them, use low flow shower heads, walk around our neighborhood instead of driving when possible, drive fuel efficient cars when we do, buy nearly everything (except food and underwear, of course) used, and also flush our toilets once every two weeks.

Okay, just kidding on that last one.  How many of you went “Ewwww”?  But we did install a low flow toilet in a recent remodel.  We also gave away old lumber on Craigslist, buy recycled and used material when possible, and used eco friendly paints and flooring.

Was everything we did eco-friendly?  No, of course not.  Who can afford that?  We just did what we could at the time, just like we do on a daily basis with our other measures.  And while we are doing it, when we remember we talk about why we doing them with our son.  Like I said, we want it all to come naturally to him as he grows older. 

To some these measures may not seem like enough, and surely we can and should do even better, but we aren’t going to kill ourselves over it.  However, if every family out there adopted many of these same measures I know it would make a huge impact on our planet.  And Mother Gaia would surely be pleased.

So tell me.  Do you have anything special planned in commemoration of Earth Day 2011.