A Drop In A Bucket

About a year ago my husband and I decided to try for a baby. He has been disabled with an unknown conditon for many years and I work 60+ hour weeks trying to make ends meet. We had all but given up on being eco-friendly, passing it off as something for those with too much money and too much time on their hands. We had better things to focus on, we figured. But the thought of bringing a child into a dying world was none too pleasant, so we decided to see what we could do with our meagar resources.

I started researching all the things we could do and found we were doing some already. We already buy in bulk (Amazon.com has a great bulk buying program where you save an additional 15% by subscribing to have the products you use anyway delivered to you home at regular intervals with free shipping too). We had also recently lost our hot water heater and replaced it with a Bosch on-demand hydrostatic water heater (it doesn't even have a pilot!). We had CFL bulbs in all our lights. We participated in our neighborhood's curbside recycling program. We never run our AC (we can't afford the bill anyway). There had to be more we could do, though.

My husband said that the planet is too far gone. I used to agree. The problem with that kind of thinking is that if everyone thought that way, nothing would ever get done! I realize that my small contribution is just a drop in a bucket and that I alone am powerless to change the direction the world is heading, but together we can fill the bucket. So I started with articles with suggestions for how to really help the environment like the following:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#topic=Environment&url=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.seql.org%252F100ways.cfm

http://www.ecospace.cc/environment/saving-environment-money-0108.htm

Then I started looking up websites for discount eco-friendly products like those available from

Let's Go Green (you can enter friend and save an extra 25% too)

and looked up green products and web coupons for other sites and that wonderful Amazon program I mentioned before. I won't go into each and every product choice here or I won't have anything else to say, but I will say that there are plenty of ways to save the environment that can also save you money in the short and long term. It is my hope that by writing this maybe people that aren't rich and don't have enough time on their hands can find ways that saving the environment can be time and money saving too. Maybe when we leave the Earth in the hands of our children, we can actually leave it a better place.