All posts by greenkrickett

Introduction to Green Living

Green Living is a way of life, a life-style change that a person or family makes to help balance the delicate sustainability between them and Earth. It is something that everyone can do, and even doing a few small things goes along way in bringing that balance back to the middle. It can also be fun, educational, and entertaining if done correctly, and the cost factor in many of the things you can do is nothing to a lot.

Yet before we start we need to know why we should be pushing this type of living so let me share some facts with you.

No one is 100% sure what the total percentage of the Earth that is polluted, but here are some facts that may surprise you. 

1: Studies estimate that thousands of elderly people die prematurely each year from exposure to fine particles.

2: Estimates of the annual human health costs of outdoor air pollution range from $14 billion to $55 billion annually.

3: Each year, pollution claims 70,000 lives in the United States.

4: Globally, an estimated 200,000 to 570,000 people die each year from ambient air.

5: Approximately 40% of all river and lakes in the USA are unsafe to fish in.

You ask what is causing all this pollution? Well many things like water-runoff from agriculture, roads, lawns, and more. Vehicle or manufacturing exhaust, Improper waste disposal and littering, Hazardous waste and sewage spills, Strip mining, deforestation, and other destructive practices, and now Fracking (which controversially is one of the most destructive forms of energy gathering on the planet.)


So how can we help to stop this pollution and help not only ourselves, and our planet, but our future generations? Easy really Green Living….

Green living is a life style choice, a choice to be as sustainable with our beloved planet as we can. What does sustainable mean you ask? Sustainability is increasing the quality of life and living within the means of the Eco-systems.

WOW does that make any sense to you? If not don’t worry it is a little more complicated than one might think. Basically what it means is that we as a society only take what a particular Eco-system can give us, while helping it to maintain itself. A perfect example of this would be an Aquifer which is a gigantic sponge like area underground that stores water, and is renewable. Many places around the world use these Aquifer’s for their drinking water. If society as a whole uses more water than can be replenished it drains until it gets to dangerously low levels. These low leveling can have catastrophic impacts on the areas onto of the Aquifer and the areas that us it.

Being sustainable would be to find ways to help it recapture water, and only use what is safe to be pulled out. It is like a fish tank, in that if we do not add water to it on occasion it will eventually get so low that the fish can’t survive. So we have to take time and add water to the fish tank so it never gets dangerously low.

Green Living is also reducing our Carbon Foot-Print. A Carbon foot-print is simply this: The total amount of greenhouse gases produced to directly or indirectly support human activities, expressed in tons of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This means that everything in our lives that produces CO2 is part of our Carbon foot print, so when playing on your computer or gaming consoles the electricity they use is part of your Carbon foot print. By simply cutting some of those things out of our daily lives or even remembering to shut off your lights can drastically improve your Carbon foot print.

Many people think living green is more work then it is worth, I say it is fun and educational and well worth the effort of doing. So what is it we can actually do to live more Green? Well there are many things a person can do to live a little more Green. What you want to do depends on your location, city services, and how much time you have. Some examples of some things you could do are: Gardening, Recycling, Cutting Energy, Composting, and even Cooking.

Green Living is about educating ourselves and others about proven and cutting edge technologies and ideas. To know that as a race we are not being sustainable and that science alone can’t solve all of our world’s problems. Change can and only will happen if people like us get together, and educate the rest of the world that it can be done, and can be done better than the way they are doing it.

Next: Types of Green Living and How to get Started

If you would like to read more on Green living or pollution please follow these links.