It’s Earth Day 2009 – just over three years since I started this blog in late 2005. When I started, the movie An Inconvenient Truth had not yet been released, the news media had not yet embraced the scientific consensus on global warming, and there was no mainstream green awareness. I won’t lie when I say this huge shift in public consciousness is mostly due to the immense influence of this blog. No thanks are necessary, other than from Mother Earth herself, who had better at the very least send me a Christmas card this year.

I’ve really enjoyed writing it. It’s been a great exercise, a great education, and it’s given me the opportunity to meet a lot of inspiring people. However, I’ve also clearly slacked off in the past year, when I went from writing an entry per day to struggling to post one per month. A lot has happened to get in the way of my devoting more time and energy to it, mostly that I’ve been focusing on the writing for which I get paid. Crassly economic though it may be, I’ve found that paying my electric bill requires financing of some sort. (No, I’m not “off the grid” – not yet!) So, rather than continue to post once a month, proudly maintaining the pretense that it makes this an active blog, I’m going to focus my energies elsewhere. I hope to come back to this at some point with renewed vigor, maybe with a budget that allows it to be a more ambitious site. But I hope even more that in the future the world is so green a blog like this is irrelevant.

My Earth Day 2009 Goals:

Cut our water/electricity bill in half. (I recently converted my front lawn to native groundcover, which makes a huge difference: lawns are giant water suckers…)

Reduce the amount of disposable plastic bags and bottles we use to zero.

Use my bicycle for all local errands.

Start an organic vegetable garden. (Can’t get much more local than your own backyard!)

I’m sure you can tell from these goals that I’m not exactly Ed Begley, Jr. Like most people, I have made efforts in some areas to be greener and at the same time have plenty of room for improvement. I use an aluminum water bottle and canvas shopping bags. But what about picking up after the dogs? What about the small bags to hold loose greens or snap peas they give you at the farmer’s market? What about plastic cups for takeout? There are easy solutions for all of these, it just involves new habits. That’s what it’s about – forming new habits.

Oprah’s Earth Day episode focused on the miles and miles of trash floating in circles around the Pacific Ocean, and they showed the now infamous photo of the turtle who got caught in a plastic ring as a baby and grew to maturity, squeezed in the center like a bow tie. It’s a sickening, sad and vivid metaphor for what we are doing to ourselves. Slowly strangling on a plastic pop can ring.

As Oren Lyons, Faith Keeper and Chief of the Wolf Clan, said in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary The 11th Hour:

The earth goes nowhere. In time, it will regenerate. And all the lakes will be pristine. The rivers, and waters, the mountains, everything will be green again. Will be peaceful. There may not be people, but the earth will regenerate. And you know why? Because the earth has all the time in the world. We don’t.

California native flower meadow in my front yard, April 2009