Even South Park Cares

I thought that this particular episode would be appropriate.



http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s10e02-smug-alert

Sadly, I can't find any clips of the episode that I want to show. So above is the link  to watch the full episode.

We have to remember that while trying to better our impact on the Earth, we need to not be smug about it or there is going to be a huge storm of self-centeredness that will destroy our cities, especially when combined with George Clooney's acceptance speech.


"Good for you!"... "Thanks!"


George Clooney's acceptance speech

All joking aside, I think we do need to pay attention more to our CO2 emissions and our impact on the Earth,

TOMS Shoes

I'm sure everyone has heard of TOMS Shoes by now, but I wanted to talk about them because they are awesome shoes and an awesome company.

For every pair of shoes you purchase, TOMS Shoes donates a pair to a child in need. They call it their One for One movement. This all got started when Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS, traveled to Argentina and discovered that many of the children there do not have shoes. He wanted to change this and it has now become a huge movement. With a little help from friends and family, Mycoskie was able to deliver 10,000 pairs of shoes in the first year of business in 2006.

In September 2010, they have given more than 1 million pairs of shoes now to children in need.

They have shoes for everyone in many different styles. Of course they have ones for the little ones too. For women, they range from plain canvas to glitter to flats to wedges. TOMS even makes shoes for weddings.

I finally found a reason to blog about hockey...

I love hockey! It is my favorite sport to watch. I've wanted to have a blog post about it, but never found out how to incorporate it into my sustainable blog. And now I have found a reason!



This was from a couple years ago, but(!!!) Washington State is the proud owner of the first LEED Silver certification in the United States, the ShoWare Center hockey arena in Kent. According to Sustainable Industries, the hockey arena is just 3 points away from having a Gold certification, which they are aiming for.



Sadly, this arena is the home of the Seattle Thunderbirds [the Everett Silvertips (my favorite WHL team) rival.] But this is still pretty awesome. The 90% of  the construction of the building is from recycle materials. The arena is also made to use 40% less water and 37% less energy. To look for some extra points outside, they have 850 parking spots reserved for carpool of 4+ people and cars that have low emissions. They also have a ton of bike racks for those workers that like to bike to work.

Okay, so my need to write about hockey is now satisfied.

Gingerbaby Goes Green: Update

The whole point in creating this blog in the first place was to talk about my goals to become more sustainable. I want to do an update now and see if I've been able to keep any of my goals.

Last quarter, I came up with 4 goals:

1. Use less electricity
2. Take shorter showers
3. By local produce
4. Use resuable bags

To be honest, I haven't been doing well on 3 of my goals. It seems that the only one that I've been able to keep up with is my first goal, using less electricity. I always unplug my laptop charger and cell phone charger after I'm done using them. I also unplug my TV and dvd player, but that's because I don't use them that much. And anytime I'm going to be gone for the weekend or longer, I unplug everything.

One goal that I really want to work on is using the resusable bags when I go grocery shopping. When I came up with that goal last quarter, I used them all the time. But now that it's a new quarter, I've slacked off quite a bit on that one.

I'm going to try and focus on 2 goals for right now, instead of 4. My 2 goals this quarter are 1) Use reusable bags and 2) take shorter showers.

So just for fun, here is a picture of me and a reusable bag.

Do you do anything or have any goals about using or consuming less? What do you do?

Tell me I would love to know what you do!