Easy Actions You Can Do To Tend Our Planet

"What can one person do?"

An environmental question for the ages. If you find yourself asking these same questions, here's a compilation I created from the visuals I found on 1 Million Women's Facebook page. Just as titled, they are "10 easy actions you can do to look after the planet this week." Click through to see all the slides.

Easy to do, and necessary to share. 

As you are going into the week ahead, which of the 10 can you do? 

1. Be a flexitarian 
2. Rethink your modes of transportation
3. Chill out your laundry
4. Go LED
5. Take action with your local/national leaders
6. Shop & use less
7. Eat why you buy--fridge-wise
8. Push away plastic
9. Eco-invest when it comes to your banking
10. Come up with your own solutions and share!

10 Easy Actions You Can Do to Look After the Planet this Week by Vicki Dabrowka--Slideshow created on Canva.com using the visual slides created using the social media visuals from the“1 Million Women” Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/1MillionWomen/posts/pfbid01T91VUhM715k5WQswHhVHJ7XawfKgSoUdeUZCiJiSXVjEuokxD1G2MEZwApiBfu1l

Green Your Day o'Green: Happy St. Patty's Day

As we have all learned during this last year, levity, fun, and humor have been the things that have severely missing. Given the weight of the last post, I thought celebrating the green o'St. Patricks Day may be the way to go. 

Go green this green holiday with these 20 ideas of  how to green up your St. Patty's Day in the greenest of eco-ways on this Irish day!

1. Don't go buying new green for your wearin' o'the green. Check out your closet and go with something you already have.

2. Want something new-to-you to wear? Visit a thrift shop and take advantage of the "reuse" industry.

3. Bow out of the glittery green hair sprays and face paints that are far from natural. Go re-usable with necklaces, hats, and accoutrements to jazz up your St. Patty's Day style.

4. Same for all of the plastic festive wear. #PlasticIsNotFantastic

5. Looking for some festive wear for your table? Use the real stuff or purchase the biodegradable variety of cups, plates, napkins, and silverware.

6. Make sure all recyclables get into your recycle bin.make sure beer cans, bottles, and other recyclables make it into the correct bin.

7. Drink eco-friendly Irish coffee.

8. Even better....take your own reusable mug.

9. Start the day instead with a green smoothie or some lovely green tea.

10. Make green the theme for your meals. Get a hefty dose of those leafy greens or other veggies in your meals du jour.

11. Going traditional feasting fare: go organic, local, grass-fed corned beef.

12. Or, move away from the meat-heavy traditional foods as meat-eating animals require a lot of environmental resources.

13. Get your green by getting outside and getting some Vitamin D, some Vitamin N(ature), and some exercise.

14. When indoors, turn off or unplug anything electronic you aren't using. Save that phantom electricity.

15. Same goes for the lights!

16. Go green with your cleaners (though, let's be honest, who's cleaning on St. Patrick's Day? Not this li'l leprechaun!)

17. Support green, eco-friendly businesses and restaurants. GreenAmerica.org is a great place to go to size that up.

18. Drink organic green beer....or at least support a local brewery.

19. If you are hitting the Irish pubs, skip the plastic straws in your beverages.

20. Likewise, if you are out and about, consider ride sharing to get home safe and sound.

All of the ideas are inspired from the following articles if you want to dive in and read more!

Kiss Me, I’m Eco-Friendly! 5 Tips for a Truly Green St. Patrick’s Day

Putting the Green in St. Patrick’s Day

REALLY Go Green with Eco-Friendly St. Patrick’s Day Activities 

How to Green Your St. Patrick's Day

15 ShamROCKIN' Ways to Go Green this St. Patrick's Day (and every day)!

Art created at canvas.com 

Climatarian Diet

I always love a good infographic. This fun one entitled "The Climatarian Diet" was created by Emiliy Ehlers (also known as "Eco With Em"). You can find her on Instagram (where she has 33K followers and it is her most active platform) as well as Facebook and Twitter . Her Instagram account is chock-filled with more like this!

You can also catch a listen of her on episode 19 of the podcast "Simply Complicated with Katie Dean."

Image from https://www.instagram.com/ecowithem_/

No-Waste Thanksgiving

I don't know about your Thanksgiving traditions, but as for many Americans, I'm nearly certain they center around the food, the feast, the festivities. And usually, lots of lots of all of that. If your house is like mine--typically too much of it!

Typically, across the United States, 40% of all food goes to waste. This stems from super-sized portions at restaurants, expiration dates, over-shopping, and on holidays like Thanksgiving, planning too much for the crew coming to you.


With all of that in mind, here are some tips to go about having a no-waste Thanksgiving (and other feasts and feeding frenzies throughout the year:

FoodTank Resources:

• This statistic from FoodTank was startling:  "Each year, consumers purchase over 700 million pounds of turkey, according to the National Turkey Federation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) projects that 35 percent of the meat purchased does not get eaten–ending up in landfills, along with sweet potatoes, green beans, pumpkin pie, and other holiday fare."
• In addition to facts like that above, there are a slew of practical ideas you can do, down to donating your leftovers to local food banks
• FoodTank provides 14 apps to help you link your excess food to your smartphone.

RecycleNation provides 8 ideas on how hone in on your planning to help cut down on too many leftovers. They include:

• checking your guest list, 
• turkey shopping for your numbers, 
• consider going meat free, 
• watching for dishes that need special ingredients (where the rest then gets wasted), 
• making stock with the bones or using FindAComposter to repurpose that food waste,
• sending leftovers home with your guests,
• getting creative with the leftovers you are left with!
• using the dishwasher versus handwashing--it's more water efficient!

Hungry Harvest's variation to the theme is also to freeze whatever leftovers you know you aren't going to get to. Additionally, bumping up those veggies always helps! MindBodyGreen and Wild Minimalist, agree, adding in letting natural items inspire your decor (versus anything store-bought or plastic).

Popular Science also included a lot of the ideas above (including finding a composting center) and this per person serving:

• 1 lb turkey per person
• Proteins 4-8 oz (1/2 cup to 1 cup)
• Starches 4-8 oz
• Vegetables 4-6 oz

However my favorite share of theirs was their link to the Guest-imator tool, a calculator designed to help you plan your Thanksgiving menu. You plug in # eaters (by small, average, and big eaters), amount of leftovers, and the type of menu you want: "Classic Thanksgiving," "Veggie Paradise." and "Smorgasbord" w/a little bit of everything. I'm definitely going to check that one out!

Whatever you plan for this Thanksgiving ahead, may your meal be plentiful, just not overflowing! Think largely while you eat lightly--maybe still a feast for you, but lightening the load on our planet!

Clipart from http://www.lovethispic.com/image/44755/snoopy-and-charlie-brown-thanksgiving; http://clipart-library.com/snoopy-thanksgiving-cliparts.html; Guest-imator image from https://savethefood.com/guestimator; video from https://youtu.be/z1X-HWPbeD4

Meatless Mondays, Part Deux

Continuing our conversation....

Whether you call it Meatless Mondays, Weekday Vegetarianism, or Flexitarianism, switching up how you eat in order to try to reduce your meat intake is a trend these days. In some circles, it's seen a trend among millennial for 2018--especially when it comes to "plant-based meat alternatives."

It's not a new concept, and in fact, there are resources galore on the subject on the web.  Some fingers (like Peggy Neu, in the TEDxManhattan video below) point back to the rationing Americans (and Europeans) did during World War II. Items like meat, cheese, butter, cooking oil, processed food, and more were rationed, making it necessary to get a little more creative in the kitchen.


Here's a multitude of resources to "make Monday the day all health breaks loose:"

• Meatless Mondays, from the non-profit Monday Campaigns and the Center for a Livable Future (CLF) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Here you will find resources for a variety of perspectives: restaurants, K-12 schools, hospitals, food service, campus, community, and corporate dining. Included here are implementation guides, free resources, and recipes.

• The Greenpeace Less Is More Movement. FoodTank details the specifics of Greenpeace's report here, including a recommendation for a 50% reduction in meat dairy by 2050. The Less Is More website does a nice job of detailing the planetary effects of eating less meat to climate change, forests, water, health, animal welfare, and fair food... as well as ways to take action.

• The Humane Society has toolkits for K-12 schools, parents, universities/colleges, and hospitals on ways to implement meatless game plans into each of these locations. (This is also where the "What Is Meatless Monday" video came from that I posted in "Flexitarians, Unite.")

• Earth Day Network made Meatless Mondays one of their 2018 "Taking Action" points for Earth Day 2018. There, you can get some key points as well as a pledge to help you deepen your commitment.

For anyone looking to lighten your meat intake, here's a list of places to find all sorts of recipes:

• Cooking Light: Our Best Meatless Monday Recipes For Fall

• Eating Well:  Meatless Monday: Healthy Vegetarian Recipes You Must Try

• Meatless Monday's Website's Recipe Portal

• Bon Appétit: 35 Weeknight Vegetarian Recipes to Embrace Meatless Mondays 

• Damn Delicious: 15 Quick & Easy Meatless Monday Recipes

• Kitchn.com: 23 Vegetarian Dinners To Make Meatless Mondays Even Easier

• It's even an entire Pinterest category--just search there for "Meatless Mondays"

At the very least, it gets us in the mode of thinking about eating a little lighter, in healthy ways, in ways that help our our planet.

Images from https://www.geneseo.edu/cas/meatless-mondays, http://www.familycounselling.com/wanting-eat-healthier-try-meatless-mondays; Video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPkV1bDZDl4

Flexitarians, Unite!

I am an unapologetic carnivore... which I know, goes against my environmentalistic ideals. But I can't help it. I do like a good steak. Also, I tend to just feel better when I focus on protein versus carbs. Granted, I know their are some vegetable-based proteins out there, but eggs, bone broth, and/or cheese best satisfy my breakfast needs to maintain my energy levels for the day... not to mention having animal protein during my other meals of the day.

Despite all of that, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the concept of "Meatless Mondays" or "Weekday Vegetarianism." Sometimes, this can be referred to as being a "Flexitarian." In fact, I was quite surprised at the number of resources on the subject I had stockpiled! It was a lot of "food for thought!" 😋

In case you are still wondering "What are Meatless Mondays?"--it's just what it sounds like. Here's a brief video from The Humane Society to explain it in more depth.


As this video shows (and the website does too), there are a lot of environmental impacts that could be had if all of us reduced our meat consumption by just one... or a few... days. Therefore, it's a worthy venture from an environmental standpoint to pursue.

Graham Hill has some good points here in his 2010 TEDTalk below, many of which mirror my still-carnivorous self. Graham poses the solution need not be a one-sided, binary, either-or situation of being meat-eater or not. He poses a 3rd option: "weekday vegetarian." Going "meatless on Mondays" poses a 4th. I don't think I'm at all ready to go full-on meatless 4 or 5 days a week, but maybe I could be a bit of a flexitarian. Could I do Mondays, or any one day a week?  Maybe. Or even: could I go 1 meal less a week?  Definitely! By looking at it fractionally on an individual level, we could potentially go make exponential growth on a societal level. It's worth thinking about.

Stay tuned for Part 2 (coming soon) for some more resources and recipes to try out to see if you are inspired to go meatless a meal or two (or even a day or two) a week.

Images from: https://steemkr.com/vegetarian/@donniechong/why-becoming-a-vegetarian, https://cindytherd.com/2017/11/10/flexitarian-diet-and-the-research-behind-it/
Videos from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpziz8cJMaI and https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian#t-225071