Sunday, April 22, 2007

   sweefundunger!!!!
HAPPY EARTH DAY!!!!

i know for lots of you, nature and the environment really are not that important...they are too far away from your familiarities that you probably simply don't care for it. but sometime, preferably today, just go out to your neighborhood park or something. maybe you'll discover why i care so deeply for our planet, why i will study to be an environmental scientist in both college and grad school, and why i consider the fate of our environment in every little task i do. <33333

yesterday, arbor day for my state, i planted 8 trees, 3 shrubs, and 1 fern at a city park in a collaborated effort with fellow citizens to give back to our planet. it was fun to hang out with friends, play in the mud, and get dirty (not to mention trying to balance on a shovel lol). by the end of those 3.5 hours, i was ready to just faint and give up, but i knew that my hard work was worth it.

everyone says to plant trees, do the 3 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), and reduce energy and water, but no one really says why.

trees conduct photosynthesis, as we all should know. they take carbon dioxide (or CO2) and convert it into oxygen (O2). all plants do this. however, humans have been burning fossil fuels for energy, causing extra CO2 to be released into the atmosphere. this buildup of CO2, a greenhouse gas, causes - well - more greenhouse gases. the greenhouse gases like CO2 trap heat coming in from the sun and keep it in the earth, whereas normally the heat would just escape back out into space. this process is called the greenhouse effect. without the greenhouse effect, the earth would freeze over. but with too much, it warms up. the earth's changing temperature is natural - but the rapid rate at which global warming is happening right now is not.

so? plant more trees and stop using so much electricity (unless it's powered by clean energy, meaning energy that doesn't release fossil fuels, like wind and solar). ^_~

the 3 Rs reduce waste like garbage. we are running out of room to put our landfills. eventually, we will run out of room. BUT we can stall that time by doing the 3 Rs, which also prevent excess garbage like on the streets or in public places, where animals may mistake them for food and injest them.

quoteS of the day
"Save the Earth! It's the only planet with chocolate." -Anonymous

"There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs, there'd be no place to put it all." -Robert Orben

Oh beautiful, for-smoggy skies,
Insecticided grain!
For strip-mined mountain's majesty's
Above thy fruited plain!
America, America, Man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs from sea to oily sea!
-George Carlin

"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks, 'They're only animals.'" -Adorno Theodor, Holocaust survivor

"Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inisde of 3 years." -Charles Haas

"You must be the change you want to see in the world." -Mahatma Gandhi

"Man did not weave the web of life. We are but one strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves." -Chief Seattle
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