Blog Action Day 09
Today is Blog Action Day, where over 8000 bloggers have committed to write about a single theme. The theme this year is climate change, so we’ll be looking at the top 10 best ways you can fight climate change in your Ecosystem Garden.
- Put your power tools away, including lawn mowers, string trimmers, leaf blowers, string trimmers, tillers, and edgers. Most gas-powered lawn and garden equipment use a 2-stroke engine, which are notoriously energy-inefficient.
- Reduce your lawn. A single lawn mower releases more air pollution than 43 new cars driving 12,000 miles each. Gas-powered lawn equipment produces as much as one tenth of the smog-forming pollutants as all mobile sources, and that Americans use 800 billion gallons of gasoline every year in lawn maintenance activities.
- Now that you’ve reduced your lawn, you have room for more native plants, which are essential to birds, pollinators, butterflies, frogs and toads, mammals, and beneficial insects. Woody plants, such as trees and shrubs, sequester large amounts of CO² and prevent it from entering the atmosphere.
- Install a green roof. Green roofs insulate your home, making it cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. This saves you money on heating and cooling bills, and lowers your use of fossil fuels and electricity. Through the process of transpiration, the vegetation on green roofs acts to cool the environment and reduce the urban heat island effect.
- A well-placed tree or windbreak can shade your home and keep it cooler in the summer and protect your home from cold winds. This reduces your consumption of heating oil and other fossil fuels.
- Remove all invasive plants from your garden. Increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide appear to favor the growth of many native plants over their native counterparts. Removing these plants from our landscapes will help to prevent this.
- Install rain barrels for rainwater harvest. A warming climate will decrease available potable water. Capturing rainwater for garden irrigation will help eliminate your need for the use of clean drinking water for irrigation.
- Plant locally native species. Native plants have evolved over thousands of years to your local climate conditions. Once established, native plants should not require supplemental irrigation.
- Install a rain garden to filter pollutants from storm water and slow its movement so that it can naturally be soaked into the soil and recharge groundwater aquifers.
- Keep a garden journal in which you record plant bloom dates, bird arrival dates, butterfly arrival dates and weather, temperature, and rainfall. Long term monitoring of these events will be an enormous help to scientists in tracking changing climate conditions.
If every homeowner acted on these suggestions the cumulative beneficial effect for our environment would be a great help in fighting the negative impacts of global climate change. What are you doing to help the environment in your garden? Do you have any other suggestions for actions we can take in our Ecosystem Gardens to protect the environment? Let us know in the comments below. And go check out Blog Action Day to see what others have written on this subject.
Here’s some other Blog Action Day Posts for you to enjoy:
Green Term of The Week: Climate Change
My Green Side on Blog Action Day 09
Three Ways to Get Kids Involved in Addressing Climate Change
Climate Change Belongs to All of Us
Impacting Climate Change One Post At a Time
© 2009 – 2010, Carole Brown. All rights reserved.
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Fantastic post, Carole. Thanks for all the helpful resource links! Cheers- Bethe @balmeras
Bethe´s last post ..What Will Your Children Remember?
I gave up my gas powered weedeater years ago because of the noise and air pollution. I have been meaning to get rid of my mower and pick up an old manual push, but haven’t got a round to it yet. This post has inspired me though. Thanks!
-Wes
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