Day 416

Common sense is just not common enough anymore – that’s what I learned today 😦

It’s 7: 17 PM on day 416 of my journey towards independence and I’ve managed to brush my teeth,  publish my Disability of the Day feature, tweet about my Clean Water For All Campaign – Michael (@USMMariner) made a donation – what I love about Michael is that he didn’t even know me yet he offered to make a donation and kept his word after he came across my story through a mutual Twitter friend – thank you SO MUCH Michael YOU ARE AWESOME 🙂 – feed myself scrambled eggs, sausages, tomato and toast  for lunch,  exercise for a couple of minutes, watch TV, feed myself rice and curry for dinner and brush my teeth once more.

As you may or may not know the COP17/CMP7 United Nations Climate Change Conference 2011 will be taking place in Durban, South Africa 28 November-9 December and although I think it’s great for the country I can’t help but marvel at the irony of the whole situation – world leaders are coming here to discuss among other things how we can as a collective reduce our carbon footprint while they themselves will be leaving a giant carbon footprint just by attending the conference (if I were a world leader I would ask my counterparts if we could stay in our respective countries and conference via Skype) – having said that I support the intention of this conference and have compiled a list of things we can all do to live a little greener starting from today. Take a look:

Going Green without Going Extreme: 5 Easy Ways You Can Make a Difference in the Environment

1. B.Y.O. Bag

Bring your own cloth or fabric bags when you shop!

If you grocery shop once a week, in five years you’ll have kept about 250 to 1,000 grocery bags out of our landfills. When one ton of plastic bags is reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil is saved! By bringing your own bag to the grocery store, you can save thousands of plastic bags from ending up in landfills, or even worse in ecosystems where they can harm living creatures.

2. B.Y.O. Flatware for a Green Workplace

Plastic silverware might be convenient, but consider this: an office of 100 people can contribute nearly 250 pounds of plastic waste to our landfills each year. Reduce meal-time refuge by bringing your own lunch utensils—and encourage your office to replace plastic forks with their biodegradable counterparts.

3. Cutting Down on Junk Mail

Modernize your life by taking control of your stuff. Monitoring the mail you receive is a great way to cut down your clutter. You’ll have less to dispose of, you’ll feel less overwhelmed, and you’ll take a step towards helping to save our environment.

4. Don’t pollute – Telecommute

Here are just a few ways you can help our environment(and yourself!) by telecommuting:

Working from home lowers gas consumption, which preserves natural resources, reduces polluting emissions such as carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons, and lessens polluting road ‘run off.’ (And think of the money and stress that’s saved!)

Cool the globe! Less commuter-related car emissions can help reduce global warming. Carbon dioxide is the major contributor of global warming.

See more clearly: Nitrogen oxides produced by excessive car emissions combine with volatile organic compounds and sunlight to produce ground-level ozone (otherwise known as smog).

Help preserve our food sources – ozone and nitrous oxides contribute to an estimated annual crop yield loss of two to four billion dollars.

Less commuting can equal more green, open spaces. Fewer cars could reduce the demand for new or wider roads, which use up land and natural resources.

Enjoy the silence. Less traffic means less noise pollution.

Become an ‘e-commuter.’ Working from home encourages use of electronic communications like email, intranet sites, and phone – significantly reducing paper use and waste.

Live on a mountain top! If you telecommute full-time, your home base is almost irrelevant – you can live where you decide your quality of life will be highest…and in the long run, this may also help reduce urban sprawl.

Write or research for a living? You’re an ideal telecommuter candidate! Talk to your employer about a flexible schedule that will allow part- or full-time telecommuting.

5. Eat Local

Buy fruits and vegetables from your local farmers market to ensure that only a minimal amount of carbon dioxide is imitated into the atmosphere during its transportation.

(Note: Tips 1-4 are courtesy of earthshare.org)

Are we connecting on Twitter? If not, say hi at http://twitter.com/Nisha360

If you’ve given to my cause or you can’t give now, please help me by sharing my cause with others. You can tweet about it like my friend Stan Faryna. This is the tweet he uses: @Nisha360 is a brave, smart young woman trying to make a better world for us all. Please help her do an amazing thing. http://bit.ly/hC7vOu

Stan’s very sweet for saying so, but feel free to write what reflects you best.

Thanks to all my friends out there who are helping me make my dream come true: to make a better world for all of us!