The Impact of Small Change (Blog Action Day)
Monday, October 15, 2007 is Blog Action Day. Thousands of bloggers across the world will all be writing on Environmental issues today.
Little Bits Add Up
When faced with the overwhelming damage to our environment, most people I know throw up their hands and ask why they should change. After all, what action can they take that would actually make a difference?
“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” It’s a good question. Very few individuals have the kind of influence in any realm to make a difference. As Mother Theresa once said, “If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”
The truth is if enough people do small things, it will add up.
Examples of Small Changes and Results
Here are some small changes that require almost no effort on our parts, yet if enough people do them, will make significant impact:
Changing A Light Bulb
“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.”[1]
Think about that. 800,000 cars by changing light bulbs. That’s a really big change for ONE light bulb per home. What if everyone did what I did and replace ALL their light bulbs? I don’t know about the big impact, but I know my electric bill dropped 80% after making the change.
Changing Paper Towels
“If every U.S. household replaced one roll of regular paper towels with 100 percent recycled ones, we’d save 544,000 trees.”[2]
One roll of regular paper towels. So if a family uses one roll per month, that’s 12 rolls per year. That would lead to 6,528,000 trees saved. That’s a lot of carbon absorbing stuff we could have around.
Or let’s be radical…let’s not use paper towels!
Sources:
[1] EnergyStar program
[2] Sierra Club Green Life Blog
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Hey Laura,
There’s so many things we could do or change if we got everyone involved…it’s true.
we started a website to try and give that idea a push:
http://www.ifeveryonedid.com
hopefully some good will come of it!
David