1000 Flowers for the Planet - #220 Become a 'Caring' Society

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #220 Become a 'Caring' Society

How you ‘care’ for others is very much open to interpretation and each individual will see it in a different way. The dictionary definition is: ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance and protection of someone or something.’ I think that describes exactly what I’ve been trying to demonstrate with my 1000 Flowers for the Planet art project. Imagine the shift in our lives if we were to live by the definition of the word ‘care’. Everything I’ve written about so far has been about looking after people, marine and land species, plant species and the planet overall. Health, welfare, maintenance and protection – these are the words we need to remember and to live by in all our transactions with each other and with the planet. Once we begin to care, we begin to heal, and we begin to make everything better.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #219 Fight Corruption

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #219 Fight Corruption

This is the one that brings us down every time – corruption. Sadly, it’s everywhere – it’s in the worst economies and the best economies, the most developed countries and the least developed countries. It’s in police forces, armies, politics, business, and even environmental groups. It’s also in patchwork group committees, parents and citizens clubs at the local school, car enthusiast clubs, genealogy groups, children’s clubs and dance clubs. It covers all areas of our lives, including defence, education, sport, climate change, private enterprise, health and government. You name it, it’s everywhere. And it undoes everything good that we do. It is created by selfish, self-serving individuals who only want power and money. It forces people struggling with poverty to resort to it. It tempts people of all races and creeds. And it has probably always been a part of human activity since the beginning of time.

Yet if we are to see our way forward, if we are to reverse the damage we’ve done by this planet in overusing resources, polluting it in every way possible and having no regard for how future generations will live, then we MUST fight corruption. If we can’t eradicate it, then we must minimise it. But it needs solid action from all quarters, a united front and a desire to function for the good of everyone and everything on this earth. I’ve made my start by speaking up today through this art project. Make your start today too.

For more information you could read www.transparency.org

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #218 Save the Lions

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #218 Save the Lions

With thanks to Guest Writer, Stephanie Keys:

There are currently around 30,000 lions living in the wild in Africa. This might sound like a lot, but only a century ago we had as many 200,000. And in West Africa there are 250 lions remaining. No, that number is not missing a zero. That means we’ve lost an average of 1,700 lions every year – so despite all the lion cubs that may be born each year, we’re still losing them faster than they’re being born. At this rate, we’ll lose our lions altogether within 20 years. Can you imagine your grandchildren not ever being able to see a lion? What kind of tragedy would it be to lose them? So what’s causing their disappearance in the wild? Poachers hunt down lions so that they can sell their bones to make tiger wine (Flower #218). Lions are also farmed, for things such as canned hunting (Flower #92) whereby hunters pay lion ‘farmers’ exorbitant amounts of money to ‘hunt’ a lion in a controlled/fenced area. There is also a phenomenon known as cub petting, in which big cat cubs are carted all over the countryside from as young as six weeks to be paraded about for the general public to interact with. Not only are the conditions of this practice unsound, using wild animals for entertainment is just against the laws of nature. And when the cub gets too old? You’d like to think that they get a nice home and live a full life. But you’d be wrong. Another threat to lions is the encroachment of humans on habitats. New land is constantly being farmed and built upon, reducing habitats and leading to lions entering within these new human spaces to find food in the form of livestock. When a lion takes the life of livestock, the people take the life of the lion. Little wonder their numbers are dwindling so quickly. Save the lions. Spread the word. Educate the people.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #217 Rally Against Lion Bone Trading

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #217 Rally Against Lion Bone Trading

[By guest contributor, Stephanie Keys]

You may have already read the flower regarding canned hunting (Flower #92). ‘Breeders’ fetch a high price for this ridiculous so-called ‘sport’. A bi-product of this, where the people running these canned hunting rackets earn even more money from our endangered creatures, is in their bones. Lion bones are used in the making of tiger wine, in which the bones are ground up and are meant to cure all sorts of ailments. It may seem to make little sense to use lion bones in tiger wine, but the reasoning is this; tigers have been poached to the point of near extinction and so their remains are becoming hard to come by. Because of this, makers of tiger wine are substituting tiger bones with lion bones. But doesn’t this seem like a bit of false advertising? If it’s tiger bones that are meant to cure the illnesses, then substituting them for lion bones wouldn’t work. UNLESS! It never worked in the first place – and as there is no scientific backup for this wine actually helping with anything to do with the function of a human being at all, it seems more than likely that this has been the case all along. However, if people keep buying the product, it will continue to be manufactured. This leaves our lions AND our tigers in jeopardy, unless something can be done. The word needs to be spread about this substituting, and people need to be educated that this ‘wine’ does nothing to help them, it’s all a placebo designed to take their hard earned cash.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #216 Use Cruise Control

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #216 Use Cruise Control

Whenever possible, use the cruise control on your car. It’s an added feature that will save on fuel usage, particularly over long distances. Cruise control makes fine adjustments to the acceleration and deceleration of your car, something we are unable to do as well ourselves, and thereby increases the efficiency of the motor vehicle, saving fuel. This reduces our demands on finite resources (oil), reduces production and associated costs in creating petrol/gas, and saves money. If multiple people take on this small step towards saving resources then the effect is multiplied and becomes significant. So next time, cruise to your destination.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #215 Brush Your Teeth Quietly

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #215 Brush Your Teeth Quietly

Continuing my theme of water saving tips, I suggest you brush your teeth quietly. How do you do that? Turn off the tap while you are actually performing the action of brushing. The noise of water rushing down the plug hole will be silenced and you will save quite a few litres of water. Multiply this by how many times you brush your teeth each day, then by the number of days in the year and you should come up with a substantial water saving. One website quoted a savings in the U.S.A. of five gallons per day with a nationwide savings of up to one and a half billion gallons. Imagine saving nearly nineteen litres of water a day by the single act of turning off the tap whilst brushing your teeth. That’s major!

1000 Flowers for the Planet # 214 Avoid Watering Lawns

1000 Flowers for the Planet # 214 Avoid Watering Lawns

Here, in one of the driest countries on earth, it’s a sensible thing to avoid watering lawns. Many other countries could do the same. Unless you’re the lawn-keeper at a major golf course, your home lawn is really not a priority for keeping green all through summer. Eventually the rain will come and any patches that may have gone slightly brown will come back green again. It’s more important to save water, our most valuable resource. By doing so, you will save many other things as well, such as the energy used in the transportation of that water to your house, and the financial savings with a reduced water bill.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #213 Shorten Your Shower

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #213 Shorten Your Shower

When we were going through a drought here in Australia, one which lasted ten years, one of the first things we were asked to do was to reduce the time we spent in our shower. Specifically, we were asked to keep it to four minutes or less. For those who stand under the pleasant, warming cascade of a hot shower for twenty minutes or so, just the idea of a four minute shower was a nightmare – but these measures had to be taken. I recall meeting a girl from the outback who was able to shower in less than a minute – and that included washing her hair. She pretty much puts the city folk to shame.

However long you spend in the shower, consider reducing it, if only by a few minutes. It will mean that much less time for water to run down the drain, wasting our most valuable resource. You’ll not only save water, you’ll have a bit of extra time for doing something else, save a few dollars in the process, and still come out clean and fresh.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #212 Use Cloth Napkins

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #212 Use Cloth Napkins

Paper napkins can be very pretty and come with an endless choice of sizes and prints to suit your décor or event. Be mindful that they are a paper product and single use, thereby thrown away into landfill. Obviously paper napkins are a big seller because you can buy them in many places, so their use is not as obsolete as one might think. It’s probably an old fashioned idea, but the use of cloth napkins is a much more environmentally friendly option, and maybe it’s time to bring back some of the traditions that grandma tried to teach us. For everyday use your cloth napkin can be used for several days, and may only need to be washed once a week. When guests visit to share a meal they will feel extra special when given a nice cloth napkin to wipe their hands and mouth upon, and it will make them feel more comfortable. Have you ever visited someone for afternoon tea when they’ve offered you a sticky treat and you’re left with dreadfully sticky fingers and nowhere to wipe them? You’re left to lick them clean as best you can and hope you don’t get caught wiping them on your clothes – not very classy!

This Flower can be about good manners and behaving with style, but if you really don’t care much about that, then consider that paper napkins are created from trees, which could be avoided if you don’t use them. The planet benefits by cutting down fewer trees, saving all the resources used in processing, creating less carbon emissions and adding to landfill.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #211 Try Vegetarian Once a Week

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #211 Try Vegetarian Once a Week

A lot of the planet’s resources are invested in raising animals for meat consumption. I confess to quite happily being a meat eater, but if every human carnivore chose to eat a meat-free meal only once a week, imagine the reduced pressure on the demand for meat, and thereby the savings of many resources such as transportation, energy, fuel, grains, and even plastic which is used to package the meat. Vegetarian meals are extremely tasty and you can make it as simple as eating a bowl of hearty vegetable soup with a piece of crusty bread – yum. It’s a very easy shift to make in your thinking, saves at least one seventh of your demand on meat products, will provide you with a much cheaper meal, so some financial savings there too, and helps the planet in a big way.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #210 Go Rinse Free

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #210 Go Rinse Free

For those who have the luxury of a dishwasher, learn to go rinse free. It is completely unnecessary to rinse your dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. The dishwasher will clean them thoroughly for you because that’s what it’s designed to do. All you need to do is scrape off any food waste, preferably into your biofermenter, not the rubbish bin. The time you save can be transferred to that once a week task – cleaning your dishwasher filter (Flower #170).

Not only does this save your valuable time for other things, like spending quality time with your family, it also saves our most valuable resource: water. Furthermore, it saves energy in transporting that water to your house, which benefits the planet, and it saves you money, benefitting your hip pocket. One small act = lots of benefits.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #209 Convert to Fluorescent Light Bulbs

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #209 Convert to Fluorescent Light Bulbs

Fluorescent light bulbs use about seventy-five percent less energy than the old fashioned incandescent bulb and have now been available for quite a long time. If you haven’t already converted to them you should consider doing so in order to save energy, reduce your electricity costs and help the planet. By using a bulb that lasts longer, fewer need to be manufactured and therefore fewer will need to be disposed of – another benefit to the planet. Every little bit helps, and switching to these easy to purchase, easy to install bulbs is a step in the right direction.

Fluorescent lighting is particularly suited to warehouse/factory usage where it is mounted quite high above the work space and needs to provide a brilliant light. The down side to fluorescents is that they contain mercury and therefore require safe disposal or recycling methods, so be mindful of looking after the environment when they come to the end of their life.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #208 Turn Off Your Computer

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #208 Turn Off Your Computer

Here’s a way to reduce your computer’s electricity usage by half – turn it off at the end of the day. Even persistent gamers have to sleep now and then, so turning the computer off at the end of play will help reduce the electricity bill. Many of us have become so used to the convenience of leaving a computer on all the time for access at the drop of a hat. We could plan our computer usage by only turning it on when we actually have a task to perform, and scheduling a single point in the day for checking email (after all, did you ever run out to your letterbox every half hour when snail mail was the norm?). This would free up our time and make us less like slaves to the computer. We could utilise this extra time to do those wonderful things we ‘never have time’ for. Maybe we would even spend more time with our loved ones doing family activities that are fun.

The environmental benefits to turning off your computer are the reduced use of energy, less in transportation costs delivering the energy, less carbon emissions, less fossil fuels being mined and then the personal benefit of lower energy bills. Lots of ‘wins’ with this one.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #207 Discourage Exotic Fish as Pets

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #207 Discourage Exotic Fish as Pets

Having beautiful things around us is a very human thing to do. We see something that makes our heart sing, we naturally want to look at it all the time. Tropical, exotic or ornamental fish (whatever you want to call them) are usually very beautiful creatures and make magnificent displays when shown off in a large fish tank or aquarium. However, as suggested in Flower #206 about unusual pets, we need to question if keeping fish as pets is purely to make us feel good or because we genuinely believe we are doing the right thing by the fish. As fish usually swim in large oceans I doubt that putting them in a limited environment could be classified as doing the right thing.

Transporting fish is an unpleasant business, if you look at it from the fish’s perspective. Usually they are transferred into plastic bags containing just enough water and limited oxygen, and then jostled about in their tiny space for the length of the journey, which can vary from local to interstate, or even overseas. There are online stores selling tropical fish with guaranteed delivery. This can only mean they use the mail service. Despite constant guarantees on these sites that the fish are provided the utmost care, imagine being a fish parcelled up in a bag of water packed into a box for shipping, then being left on someone’s front porch in the sun waiting for your new owner to come home.

Leave the fish where they survive best – in those parts of the oceans where they have adapted to particular living conditions, where they are part of their own school, can breed naturally and ultimately be part of the food chain.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #206 Discourage Unusual Pets

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #206 Discourage Unusual Pets

What is an unusual pet? The answer could be anything from a lizard to a lion. Some think of ‘unusual’ as something that would normally be wild, others may think it is a creature that is ‘rare’ (in other words, endangered). Personally, when I see the way people treat animals I think we should ban pet ownership all together. Why do people think it’s okay to dress up an animal in clothing, put large birds in small cages, keep tropical creatures in cool climate zones, ‘train’ animals to do unnatural things or take on human emotional responses. Animals are not humans. They don’t understand jokes or sarcasm, and they don’t care about the latest fashion trends. They do require a life wherein they live with their own kind, are able to exhibit natural behaviour in an environment that suits their needs, and procreate in a natural way.

People like to keep unusual pets because it makes them feel different. It’s more about being able to identify oneself as “tough because I own a leopard”, or “cool because I own a giant python”, or “affluent because I own a macaw”. It’s more about the feeling it provides the owner than the owner feeling they are giving this creature a better life. The best life for the animal is in its own environment with its own kind. One website I came across had a very strong opinion in favour of humans keeping unusual pets, with a firm belief that to suggest humans should not keep unusual pets was “infringing on the freedom of choice and lifestyle pursuits of others.” This is a perfect example of the issue being all about the human and not at all about the animal.

Before deciding to ‘own’ a creature of any kind, think carefully. Think about whether this act is for yourself or because you believe you are giving that creature the best possible life it can have. If, like me, you conclude that most creatures are better off in their natural environment with their own species, then discourage unusual pets.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #205 Donate to an Environmental Fund

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #205 Donate to an Environmental Fund

If you don’t have the time or skills to volunteer at a wildlife reserve, consider helping out financially by making a donation to an environmental fund. There are many funds to consider: sumofus.org; savethewhales.org; makeitpossible.com; greenpeace.org; cannedlion.org; cleanup.org.au; seashepherd.org; wspa.org.au; animalsaustralia.org. There are many, many good organisations out there that consist of people trying their best every day to improve the planet, improve the world in which we live, make it a better place for us and make it a better place for other creatures that share it with us. These people need financial assistance to keep going, fighting the fights that so many of us are unprepared to fight ourselves, yet happy to whinge about. Let’s put our hands in our pockets and donate what we can to keep the good fights going. Choose whatever fund/s mean the most to you. Maybe you can only afford a small one-off donation, maybe you can stretch it to a small contribution every month – whatever you can do, do it, for the sake of the planet.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #204 Volunteer at a Wildlife Reserve

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #204 Volunteer at a Wildlife Reserve

All around the world we have wildlife reserves supported by dedicated people who care about animals and their future on this planet. As humans take more and more land for farming and urban sprawl, animals are left with less space to roam, to feed and to multiply. Wildlife reserves are becoming ever more important to the survival of many species, yet often they are not financially supported by governments, or receive minimal funding. If you have a love of animals and a wildlife reserve exists near where you live, consider giving some of your time to volunteer and contribute to the preservation of your native species and perhaps some from distant lands as well. The rewards will be many, as you do your bit towards saving endangered species, or protecting animals from poachers.

Volunteers can take on appropriate tasks that suit each individual. You might be able to offer veterinary assistance, prepare food, become a tour guide, clean enclosures or do general maintenance – every task is as important as the other to make the whole reserve function well. You will meet like-minded people, make new friends, enjoy the company of the animals you’re assisting, learn new things and above all, help save the beautiful animals the reserve is protecting. That’s a good service to the planet.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #203 Install a Possum Box

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #203 Install a Possum Box

In Australia possums often cause eye rolls in conversations about the roof space having been invaded by tiny furry creatures wearing hob-nail boots, who like to stomp around when we’re trying to sleep. It can be a frustrating thing to get a possum permanently out of the roof – the entry point (often a loose roof tile) needs to be closed off, but only after the possum has exited to go and feed, and this will only happen after dark, meaning the roof repair will be a late night affair.

Possums are nocturnal creatures and like to live in cosy places such as tree hollows, where they can snuggle up during the daylight hours, safely away from other animals and the glare of the sun. With many trees being cleared, possums have less opportunity for a safe place to live and may well be tempted to take up residence in your roof. Supplying them with a possum box is a win/win solution, allowing humans and possums to live side by side more peaceably. This government website has all the information you need for building and installing the right type of possum box for your area, whether you’re looking after brush tails, ring tails, or sugar gliders:

http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/animals/GuideToMakingAPossumHouse.htm

If you can’t make your own possum box there are plenty of people selling ready-made boxes. Just be sure to get the correct type of box for the possums in your area.

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #202 Put Up a Bumblebee House

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #202 Put Up a Bumblebee House

With thanks to ‘allaboutwildlife.com’ for today’s Flower inspiration. Source: http://www.allaboutwildlife.com/ten-ways-to-help-wildlife

“Another type of creature that has suffered greatly from habitat loss is the bumblebee and other “solitary” bees—the bees that were pollinating America’s flowering plants for thousands of years before Europeans introduced the honeybee to [the] continent. You can help native bees by either building or buying a bumblebee “house” and establishing it in a suitable location. … some plans for a simple bumblebee house [are available at www.allaboutwildlife.com], [or] an internet search will turn up more, as well as more information about these important and fascinating creatures.”

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #201 Put Up a Bird House

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #201 Put Up a Bird House

With thanks to ‘allaboutwildlife.com’ for today’s Flower inspiration. Source: http://www.allaboutwildlife.com/ten-ways-to-help-wildlife

“Development by humans has not only destroyed areas where wildlife searches for food, it has also deprived birds, animals and insects of places to live and raise their young. One way we can all compensate for this loss is to replace some of these lost nesting and resting sites.

Probably the most familiar artificial nesting site is the birdhouse. And birdhouses certainly do help, especially if they are built specifically to suit the requirements of one or more of our beleaguered native bird species.

If you plan on putting up a few birdhouses, why not do a little research ahead of time to find out which birds in your area are most in need of artificial shelter—and then build or buy the types of houses that are most likely to attract them? Not surprisingly, different birds have different needs in a house, including preferences in the size of the house, its location, and the diameter of the opening. There are also precautions you can take to make sure predators can’t get into the house to kill the birds or their young.”