Jennifer Lambert

A Sacred Balance

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Earth Day Unit Study

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It’s our 50th Earth Day and we’ve been watching the reduced carbon emissions while in quarantine.

Perhaps Mother Earth wanted to heal Herself?

I remember being a child growing up in the 1980s and learning about Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! But it never seemed to really catch on. It just wasn’t a dire issue and my county/city didn’t offer weekly service. No one wants to pay for something extra that doesn’t directly affect them.

I want to do better as a family now, but it’s really hard when the eggs come in styrofoam and so many other grocery and takeout items are in lots of unnecessary packaging.

We clear up the trash at our neighborhood ponds and backyard creek regularly. We feed the birds. It seems so little.

Our country is behind many others in earth stewardship. We are vast and huge and populous and no one really seems to care about climate change or protecting the environment.

When we lived in Germany for three years, we separated our waste into refuse, organic, and recycling every week.

We have curbside recycling service every other week now in our suburb of Dayton, Ohio.

But is recycling all we can do?

I want my kids to be better stewards of the Earth since it’s our only home and we must take good care of it for future generations.

Earth Day Unit Study

Ideas

  • Gardening
  • Recycling
  • Reduce waste
  • Try to go plastic free for a period of time. It’s really hard!
  • Reading about nature, natural history, environment, climate change, earthjustice
  • Clean up trash in your yard, a local park, local waterway
  • Feed the birds in your yard
  • Go on a nature walk or hike
  • Plant native trees, bushes, plants in the yard
  • Watch nature documentaries

We did a small focus on female environmentalists:

  • Anna Comstock
  • Rachel Carson
  • Dian Fossey
  • Caitlin O’Connell
  • Patricia Medici
  • Kay Holecamp
  • Jane Goodall
  • Wangari Maathai
  • Isatou Ceesay
  • Evelyn Cheesman
  • Eugenie Clark
  • Katherine Olivia Sessions
  • Sylvia Earle
  • Greta Thunberg
  • Jennifer Mather
  • Jenny Graves
  • Kimberly Stewart

Tips to celebrate Earth Day from home:

  1. Get outside. Your backyard is an outdoor living room and safe place for pets and kids to play. Science proves spending time in your family’s yard is good for your health and well-being, and so important today as everyone looks for creative ways to stay well while being confined to the home. Researchers have found that people living in neighborhoods with more birds, shrubs, and trees are less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and stress.
  2. Make the outdoors a family project. Take your loved ones outside to assess your space. What’s working well? What could be improved? What can you plan to do together in your backyard? Anything needing to be cleaned up? Make a plan to expand or spruce up your yard.
  3. Connect kids to nature. The environmental education program resources and activities, based on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) principles, give kids the prompts they need to have fun learning about and exploring the nature and science in their own backyards.
  4. Know your climate zone. Learn about climate-zone-appropriate plants, the importance of pollinators, and how backyards can support local wildlife. Conduct a plant inventory to determine what’s currently thriving in your backyard. Match that up against the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map to determine the best types of turf, trees, shrubs, and plants for the climate zone. 
  5. Keep pollinators in mind. Your yard is an important part of the connected ecosystem providing much- needed food and shelter for pollinators, such as birds, bees, butterflies, bats, and other creatures. Select a variety of plants that will bloom all year long. The Audubon Society’s database can help determine which birds will be attracted to which plants for unique regions so you can make good choices about what to plant. 
  6. Plant, prune, or mow. Staying confined to home base doesn’t mean gardening and yard work have to stop. Order garden supplies online or have them delivered from a nearby nursery. Mow the lawn and trim bushes. Research shows people who gardened for at least 30 minutes a week had lower body mass indexes (BMIs)—a measure of body fat—as well as higher levels of self-esteem and better moods overall. They also reported lower levels of tension and stress.

Books:

I have been in love with the sky since birth. And when I could fly, I wanted to go higher, to enter space and become a “man of the heights.” During the eight days I spent in space, I realized the mankind needs height primarily to better know our long-suffering Earth, to see what cannot be seen close up. Not just to love her beauty, but also to ensure that we do not bring even the slightest harm to the natural world.

Pham Tuan, Vietnamese astronaut

Videos:

Resources:

How do you celebrate Earth Day?

Linking up: Welcome Heart, Anita Ojeda, April Harris, Marilyn’s Treats, Create with Joy, Mostly Blogging, Mary Geisen, Little Cottage, LouLou Girls, Our Home, Our Three Peas, Grandma’s Ideas, Worth Beyond Rubies, Soaring with Him, InstaEncouragements, Ducks in a Row, Girlish Whims, Fluster Buster, Ginger Snap Crafts, Suburbia, Heartsie Girl, Penny’s Passion, Katherine’s Corner. Crystal Storms, Debbie Kitterman, Slices of Life, CKK, Ridge Haven Homestead, Anchored Abode, Life Beyond the Kitchen, Chic on a Shoestring, Answer is Choco, Momfessionals, Simply Sweet Home, MareeDee, Fireman’s Wife, CWJ, Kris and Larry,

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Comments

  2. Being much older than you, we were raised to reduce (which was easy because people simply had less), reuse (people were so much more frugal in my growing up years everyone save string, wrapping paper and ribbon to reuse it), and recycle…well there were always paper drives to do recycling and in some area’s there were rag collections. Men who collected old rags to repurpose them in lots of ways. Then after that period came plastic and well things went downhill for sure. But, our community was actually one of leaders in the recurrence of RRR . We had curbside containers where items were separated, glass, paper, tin/metal. It was collected weekly for free. We paid for trash pick up, so the better job you did recycling, the less trash you had. It was a really good system and was modeled by many other locations for years. We put out trash maybe once a month, but recycling weekly. We did such a good job there was a glut of recycled stuff, and the market for it fell. We still recycle, but trash pick up, yard waste, and recycling are rolled together in one price, so we’ve lost the incentive. However, I think most of the community was so used to things, they continue to do a good job with recycling. Popped in from Flaunt it Friday, though for some reason I wasn’t able to join the linky, decided to do some blog visiting just the same as I would if I had been successful with the linky.

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