Earth Day 2009 April 22, 2009

 

 Helping Kids Care For the Earth – Ideas For Earth Day and Beyond
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jamie_Jefferson]Jamie Jefferson

Earth Day is April 22, and while it’s important to get involved on this day, there are things we can do as families that will make a huge impact throughout the year.

It starts with helping our kids to celebrate the world in which we live, and it continues with helping them to love it so much that they want to do everything they can to help protect it. Here are six ideas to help your kids celebrate and care for our earth:

1. Get out and enjoy it. Researchers are now saying that simply getting kids outside in nature may be the most effective way to raise their awareness of environmental issues. Suddenly, these problems that they hear about on the news and in the classroom have a real impact on their daily lives. They see firsthand how a forest or a beach or a tidepool or a meadow is teeming with life, with ecological relationships that are interdependent, delicate and complex.

To encourage your kids to get out there and enjoy the natural world, you may have to purposefully inject some extra excitement in the idea, but just at first. Take your dog (or a friend’s dog) for a walk in the woods. A dog’s love for nature, and subsequent enjoyment of it, is infectious. Create a list of things to find and make your adventure into the outdoors into a scavenger hunt.

If possible, and if your kids are old enough to be by themselves out there, find a safe place for them to play in a natural environment. Allow them to go there to get away, to sit and think or to talk with their friends. Make a point to get the kids out in nature every day. Better yet, go with them.

2. Watch “An Inconvenient Truth” as a family for inspiration. Invite some of your children’s friends over to watch it with their parents and talk about some initiatives that you can each commit to or some larger projects that you can work on as a neighborhood or community.

3. Help your kids learn about endangered animals. Together, look into organizations that help endangered animals and see how you can get involved.

4. Reduce and re-use, then recycle. Lots of kids get excited about recycling. Fewer are into reducing or re-using. Model to your children a healthy pattern of consumption. Talk frequently about the many benefits (which go way beyond environmental) of living a simple life and of being wary of a lifestyle of mass consumerism. As kids spend more time outside and less time at the mall or watching television advertisements, this shift may feel increasingly more natural to them.

5. Teach your kids about potentially harmful chemicals and how they can be everywhere in our world: in the foods we eat, in the supplies we use to clean the house, in our paint, in our cosmetics, in our lawn care products. Turn the search for these things into a game and allow your kids to be detectives, learning about and seeking out these harmful chemicals and then finding natural alternatives.

6. The next time you take the kids to the grocery store, see how you can minimize the amount of packaging that you purchase. We have been known to purposefully not purchase an item because of the manufacturer’s use of wasteful packaging. It won’t take long for the kids to realize that the best item in the store for minimal packaging: raw fruits and vegetables.

In our family, the more we can make these life changes into a game, the more apt the kids are to follow suit. Help your kids to understand how one person really can make a difference (especially when that person is part of a committed family or group) and review often the personal impact that you all have made.

Jamie Jefferson writes for Momscape.com and Susies-coupons.com, where you’ll find discounts on ethically-made [http://www.susies-coupons.com/body.htm]natural beauty products as well as coupons for green living and [http://www.momscape.com/coupon-codes/gaiam.htm]organic products.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jamie_Jefferson http://EzineArticles.com/?Helping-Kids-Care-For-the-Earth—Ideas-For-Earth-Day-and-Beyond&id=2226994

 

Earth Hour Clocks Global Success April 1, 2009

Earth Hour Clocks Global Success
By Roy Mark
2009-03-30

Article Views: 19967
Article Rating: / 46

The worldwide event to call attention to climate change puts up its strongest numbers in the three-year history of Earth Hour. From the remote Chatham Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean to Sydney’s Opera House to the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building to Seattle’s Space Needle, lights dimmed for 1 hour in a symbolic call to change the Kyoto Protocol.

It began over the remote Chatham Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean and from there—time zone by time zone—Earth Hour 2009 marched around the globe March 28, with hundreds of cities and communities and millions of individuals dimming their lights to call attention to climate change. In all, nearly 1,000 global landmarks went dark for an hour, including New York’s Empire State Building, Paris’ Eiffel Tower, the dome of St. Peters in the Vatican and the Christ the Redeemer statue on Mount Corcovado overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro.

While Earth Hour sponsor World Wildlife Foundation did not have all the data yet, it predicted that participation in the third annual event exceeded 2008, when some 53 million people in 371 cities in 35 countries participated. The 2007 inaugural Earth Hour was limited to Sydney, Australia.

WWF officials called Earth Hour, “The world’s first-ever global vote about the future of our planet.” Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’ top climate change official, said Earth Hour marked a global momentum to seek climate change mandates in the Kyoto Protocol, including controlling heat emissions. World leaders are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December to hammer out more climate change controls.

“The true power of Earth Hour can be seen in the tremendous opportunity for individuals, communities, businesses and governments around the world to unite for a common purpose, against a common threat which affects us all,” said U.S. WWF President and CEO Carter Roberts. “As the world witnessed Saturday night, the simple action of turning off lights can inspire people around the world to take action and to make a serious long-term commitment to living more sustainable lives.”

City after city in the United States dimmed their lights as Earth Hour moved across the continent. Joining the Empire State Building in New York was the iconic Chrysler Building. Even some neon signs in New York’s Times Square and Broadway’s theater dimmed their lights. Across the river in New Jersey, the lights went down for an hour at Thomas Edison’s laboratory in West Orange.

In Washington, where climate change advocates have high hopes for the Obama administration’s position on climate change, the Capitol Dome darkened as organizers held a candle-light procession.

On and on it went, with Chicago; Dallas; Houston; Las Vegas; Miami, Fla.; Nashville, Tenn.; Salt Lake City, St. Louis; and Tucson, Ariz., all marking Earth Hour. On the West Coast, the Space Needle in Seattle and the Santa Monica Pier & Ferris Wheel and Nokia Plaza in Los Angeles dimmed their lights.

Earlier, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had described WWF’s Earth Hour as “the largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted.”

“Earth Hour is a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message they want action on climate change,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “[Earth Hour is] the largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted.”

BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion launched a special Website, accessible only through certain BlackBerry devices, supporting Earth Hour. Owners of the BlackBerry Bold, Storm, Curve, Curve 8900, Curve 8800 and Pearl smartphones were able to access the site, which allowed users to access the latest news and videos about Earth Hour.

Pictures of Earth Hour around the Globe.

http://http://digg.com/travel_places/Earth_Hour_2009_Pics?OTC-em-st1