Start A Green Living Now!
Archive for March, 2010
Eco-friendly Easter! - Complete Report
Easter is coming up fast. April 4 will be here soon enough. If you celebrate this holiday, but you're also concerned about the environment, you may be facing a dilemma. After all, like most major holidays, Easter has been heavily commercialized, and the traditional activities require a lot of spending and create a lot of garbage, plus there seems to be an awful lot of sugar and artificial coloring around. That's bad news for anyone wanting to contribute less to the waste stream. Having an Easter without these things can look difficult, if you just look at what's available in ordinary stores. So, what can you do to cut down your impact on the environment without telling the kids they're going to have to give up Easter this year? Let's take a look at some of your options for an eco-friendly Easter celebration that'll still be lots of fun, but won't break the budget. Why Choose An Eco-Friendly Easter Easter can produce a lot of waste, and have a bigger impact on the world around us than it might seem at first glance. However, the basic components of an Easter celebration don't have to be ecologically problematic. You can paint eggs, give treats, ...- Bookmark :
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Make your Own Delicious Home-Baked Bread
Few experiences delight the senses as stepping in from the cold outdoors and into a cozy home rich with the smell of baking bread. Grab a stick of butter, settle into the breakfast nook and get ready to enjoy one of the most cherished comfort foods. What? You haven’t ever lifted a loaf of home baked bread from your own oven? Don’t despair … it’s not as hard as it looks! For the uninitiated, bread baking is fraught with peril … activating the yeast, kneading the dough, finding the right spot to let the dough rise, and shaping the dough into a reasonably tantalizing shape. But bread making is one of the most basic cooking skills learned in cultures around the world and can truly be mastered by anyone. Bread comes in many shapes and forms: unleavened flat breads, such as tortillas and pita, quick breads like Irish Soda Bread and corn bread, sweet breads such as zucchini or whole wheat raisin bread and yeast breads like sourdough and potato bread. Start with something simple – sweet breads mix up just like cake batter – and work your way into more advanced techniques. Quick breads and sweet breads require little experience to perfect ...- Bookmark :
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Downshifting Life and Being Green
When the road becomes too steep, the climb too challenging, we downshift. The engine slows and the torque is increased to improve the overall performance of the vehicle. Green downshifting applies this same basic driving concept to life. Our society is experiencing yet another dramatic adjustment in business, finance and lifestyle. Everyone is looking for ways to cut back … to do more with less, or even to have less and be satisfied. This requires reassessing priorities and returning to basics. In these lean times more and more people look for ways to cut back without losing their sense of self. They don’t want to lose social status or sacrifice their own enjoyment of the finer things in life. But now, in the 21st Century, we are operating on a heightened social consciousness. More importantly, vital earth’s resources are being consumed at an alarming rate by a growing population whose excesses denude not only the landscape, but the basic molecular structure of the earth. So how do we fix such a broken machine? The world’s population continues to grow exponentially each and every day. Major natural adjustments, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes may well be the earth’s efforts to shake the fleas ...- Bookmark :
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Book Reading: The Eco-friendly Way
You’re a reader and you are concerned about the effect that paper production has on the environment. That’s apparent, because you’re here. But how do you move beyond the obvious – buying books at the major bookseller – to support eco-friendly book production? There are so many options out there that we wonder why the obvious is so often overlooked. Local libraries dot even the smallest towns. It’s the age-old adage of “share and share alike.” For the price of a few minutes of your time you are awarded a library card … the “golden ticket” to the greatest tomes of all time. You check them out, read them at your leisure, and return them in exchange for the next best-seller on your list. Keep an eye out for your library’s book sales, as well. These are fabulous opportunities to comb through the thousands of books they are clearing from their shelves for good reads at bargain-basement prices. Most libraries hold annual book sales that are well advertised weeks in advance. A well packed bag of 20 or 30 volumes can be carted away for as little as $5 in many locales. Modern libraries have gone “high-tech” and offer members videos, DVDs, tapes ...- Bookmark :
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Going Green - Arts and Crafts Report
Searching around your home can lead you to discover many things you can convert into crafts. Reusing items which you may otherwise discard can also be acceptable to the environment. Things like buttons, cans, magazines, shoe boxes, tissue boxes, and cereal boxes can be utilized in making worthwhile projects of arts and crafts. A good example of a recycled project would be converting a cereal box into a file or magazine clipper perhaps. You need to first cut off the top portion of the box, and then cutting off the narrow side of the cereal box to simulate a file or folder holder. You should cut about 4 to 5 inches down from below the box. After you have simulated the shape of a magazine clipper, you can then either decorate it or paint it to enhance its appearance. You can paste art paper or beautiful stickers all around it, and with the finished product, you can organize your magazines, files, and important papers in it. The humble looking tissue box, when it gets empty already, can be turned into a sort of small plastic bag container. You can first decorate it as you would like, then enlarge the hole a little ...- Bookmark :
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