The Real Life Environmentalist - Take One

Happy Wednesday, y'all!

Silver Falls Trail, Ohanapecosh,
Mount Rainier National Park, Washington

Welcome to my first blog post on The Real Life Environmentalist!  As many of you know, I am incredibly passionate about bettering the environment and making conscious efforts to do my part to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Here, I plan to share practical ideas, tips, and tricks that we can all do to help clean up the environment and better the planet that we call home!

For my first post, I would like to give some insight into why I am passionate about the environment and making a difference in the effect that humans have on it.

Our planet is so beautiful and such a wonderful place.  We MUST start taking better care of it, and NOW.  We cannot keep procrastinating and putting it off.

Sunset Beach, North Shore,
Hawaii

I am an avid lover of nature.  I love all different types of terrain, from mountains to deserts, islands and beaches, forests - I love it all!  I also love to photograph scenery in the places I have been.  I love the untouched views and breathtaking sights that nature provides us.  Standing on mountaintops with my feet on the bare earth, or on the beach with my toes in the sand - I definitely go barefoot everywhere that is socially acceptable, and many places where it is not 😜 - it seems as though the vastness and beauty of nature is unending, perpetual, invincible.  The reality is that it is not.  We are encroaching on that beauty every single day, more and more, at a faster speed every day.  The more we as a society focus on convenience, greed, and disposability, the worse this problem gets.

Balancing Rock, Big Bend National Park,
Texas

Recycling is a problem - many cities don't have adequate facilities, so the recycling programs often result in the "recycled objects" ending up in the dump and landfills. Check out this New York Times article from May 2018 that goes into more detail.  Many citizens also don't take the time to check their local recycling program's requirements and restrictions, so items that are not recyclable are placed in recycling.  Some programs have had to discontinue the service due to equipment issues and/or higher costs as a result of improper recycling behaviors by participants.  Take a moment to check with your recycling program to see what the allowable recyclables are.

Grandview, Texas

Littering becomes increasingly worse with the higher population counts, of course.  As more people inhabit the planet, the more trash ends up where it doesn't belong.  Oceans, fields, roadsides, etc. end up littered with trash.  Ultimately, many of this trash ends up in the oceans (71% of the Earth's surface is water).  We will explore the effects of trash pollution in waterways in a later post.  One of my favorite charities, 4ocean, is dedicated to the cleaning up of our oceans.  We can help further this cause by actually properly disposing of trash and recyclables before they have the chance to enter our planet's water.




I will continue to share more with y'all as I continue this blog.  I will share videos, tips, tricks, and more.  Thank you for hanging in there through my first post.  I look forward to sharing my adventures through being The Real Life Environmentalist with y'all!