The Importance of Green Social Initiatives
Recycling your used tin cans, carpooling with your coworkers, and turning lights off when you leave the room: These are all great individual acts of green thinking that help to reduce your personal carbon footprint and minimize your impact on the planet. But sometimes being green can be a lonely business. And, while individual acts are extremely important and worthwhile, we can accomplish even more through green group initiatives. Community green initiatives are a great way for you to support an extended environmental movement and improve your social life at the same time. Not only do these crowd-sourced solutions to energy and environmental problems help to solve bigger problems, they also give you access to more green resources, make it simpler for you to live an eco-friendly life, and allow you to share ideas and knowledge with those down the street or around the corner. Take a look at these fun green group initiatives to see how you can get involved.
Green Social Initiatives
1. Car Sharing
If you’re in need of a vehicle but don’t like the idea of owning one of your own, you can either rent one or, better yet, join a car sharing program. Unlike a car rental agency that has you booking a vehicle in daily increments, a car sharing program lets you share a vehicle for shorter periods of time (though longer bookings are also possible). Though the format is different from club to club, here are some general characteristics that set car sharing apart from car rental options:
-You often sign up as a member; some clubs require a membership fee.
-Booking is generally self-service, usually online, 24/7.
-You can rent by the minute, hour, day, or week and rates include fuel, maintenance, and insurance.
-You pick up your vehicle from distributed locations rather than a central location. [1]
Car sharing is great for people who live in urban centers who want to avoid the costs of owning a car while doing something good for the planet. Resources are saved with shared vehicles and fuel costs minimized by distributed pick-up and drop-off locations. You can find car sharing organizations worldwide, and especially in the U.S., through CarSharing.net.
Photo Source: flickr.com
2. Book Clubs
Another great way to share is to join a book club. Instead of having an entire library of books you’ve only read once (if at all), join your local library or your community book-sharing group. Through these organizations, you can borrow books, trade and swap books, and donate used books so that others can enjoy them. This helps to reduce the number of trees harvested to print new books and extends the life of existing books as well. Plus, borrowing a book from nearby also reduces the miles it has to travel to get to you (compared to ordering a new book online, which must ship from a warehouse). And you never know whom you’ll meet down the green book-borrowing aisle. For an even greener book-sharing experience, try one that’s focused on eco-friendly living. These groups of book sharers exchange written resources that educate entire communities about the benefits of various environmental actions, such as reducing water consumption, energy use, and waste. [2]
Photo Source: flickr.com
3. Group Gardening
An age-old green activity, group gardening is a great way to work with your community to develop eco-friendly food-sourcing habits while enjoying time with neighbors and new friends. This can take many forms:
-Community gardens help those without yard space cultivate their own fruits, veggies, and flowers in a community setting.
-Community Support Agriculture (CSA) programs make it possible for individuals to buy directly from local farmers in exchange for guaranteed funding support (and sometimes sweat equity) regardless of the yield. This is great for farmers and provides local produce that travels less distance than supermarket foods.
-Guerrilla gardening is one of the new group gardening options. What is it? Gardening enthusiasts who take it upon themselves to plant flowers and other foliage in public spaces, such as along roadsides, in abandoned lots, under street lights, and so on. It’s a whimsical way to bring fresh, green life to otherwise neglected spaces and have fun with like-minded garden lovers. [3]
Regardless of which group gardening option you choose, you’ll be helping to green up neglected spaces, produce food locally and cheaply (and hopefully organically), reduce climate change, and make your neighborhood a more pleasant place in which to live.
Photo Source: flickr.com
4. Recycling
Ever cringed as you threw something away, wishing you had a way to recycle it? Well, you’re in luck! Today, there are numerous online recycling and swapping sites that allow you to creatively and sustainably reduce your waste with as little hassle as possible. Essentially, these group recycling programs provide a matchmaking service – they match people looking to get rid of stuff with people looking for resources. Through group recycling, you can swap, trade, or simply give away virtually anything these days. Consider these possible group swap options:
-Used building materials such as wood flooring, doors and windows, insulation, and paint
-Grocery bags, soda bottles, and glass containers
-Old electronics like computers, monitors, printers, and peripheral devices
-Vehicles and vehicle parts, bicycles and bicycle parts
-Furniture and appliances
-Clothing and shoes
-Holiday decorations, costumes, and home décor items
-Services [4]
Recycling in your community helps the environment in a number of important ways. First, it reduces the tons of waste going to your local landfill. Second, it saves valuable resources from being wasted. And, third, it prevents the expenditure of additional water and energy to create new products by putting old ones to use. Plus, it’s a whole lot of fun.
Photo Source: flickr.com
5. Plastic-Free Life?
Perhaps one of the most obvious signs of environmental degradation is the sight of a plastic bottle in the ditch or an old toothbrush that has washed onto shore. Plastics are ubiquitous in our lives. And, because they’re made from petroleum byproducts, are hard and often inefficient to recycle, and end up littering our planet, many humans are grouping together to ditch plastics altogether. [5] If you really want to challenge yourself to live more greenly, join a group that’s pledging to give up plastic for a month, and you’ll soon learn just how dependent you are on plastic. These groups provide practical solutions, moral support, and real targets to aim for if you’re interested in reducing your use of plastics. [6]
Photo Source: flickr.com
6. Conserving Water
Water is one of the most basic and necessary resources we have on the planet, but our water resources are fast disappearing. Threats to clean water include:
-Deforestation
-Overconsumption
-Toxic contamination from industry and residential chemical use
-Pollution from farms, sewars, and manufacturing
-Dams and other water diversions
-Privatization
Experts predict that wars of the future will be fought not over oil but over water resources. This is a serious issue that demands that we all take note and start to use less. This is especially true of Americans – we use 100 gallons of water per day, even though it is estimated that we only need 2.5 gallons of water daily to survive. [7] So, if you’re looking for a community organization that will encourage you to reduce your water consumption, why not find a watershed protection group in your local area, contact your water utility company for ideas on how to conserve, and make a pledge to significantly reduce the water you consume on a daily basis?
Photo Source: flickr.com
7. Bike Sharing
Just like car sharing, bike sharing is another way to reduce your monthly transportation costs while also limiting (or completely eliminating) your emissions. Bike sharing programs usually involve distributed bike pick-up and drop-off locations in urban centers. You simply amble up to the rental meter, plug in your cash or credit for a small fee, and ride away. When you’re done, drop the bike off at the same location or a different one (it usually doesn’t matter). No bike ownership costs, no maintenance hassles, and good exercise for you! There are bike sharing programs cropping up all over the world.
Photo Source: flickr.com
8. Community Bee Keeping
We love our sweets, and there’s nothing quite like fresh, locally produced honey. Bees are seriously important for our overall ecosystem, especially our food and flower crops. Bees pollinate a vast majority of our produce crops, and, without them, we’d likely have a severely limited diet. Sadly, however, bee populations worldwide are suffering from a variety of threats (scientists are having a hard time determining exactly which ones are to blame). Want to help? Why not join a community bee-keeping group? By doing so, you’ll meet other green-minded people eager to help preserve local bee populations while also producing delicious honey for you and your family at a low cost.
Photo Source: flickr.com
9. Community-Owned Renewable Energy
Another really exciting green group initiative option is to join a community-owned renewable energy project. Though you can form your own community wind farm or solar farm in whatever way suits your community best, most often, these green initiatives involve pooled money and pooled profits. Each member puts up a certain amount of financial capital and in return has a share in the clean-energy-generating equipment – and the profits to boot. Plus, by living in close proximity to the generating station, they also receive the benefit of renewable energy for their own homes as well.
Photo Source: flickr.com
10. Accountability
If you delve into any one of these issues – resource consumption, waste, water pollution, climate change – you’ll find that, at the core, there are issues of social and environmental justice. Generally people living in low-income communities are the ones who suffer the most when the environment is trashed. They suffer for higher levels of pollution, lower-quality food sources, less green space, and more. To tackle these broad and often intimidating issues, many communities are forming social justice groups to make a difference. These people work together to watch for social or environmental injustice and try to solve problems and stop perpetrators. They also help by making it easier for you to support businesses that are acting in the best interest of your community and the world at large. If you’re into big-picture thinking, joining one of these groups may be the thing for you. [8]
Photo Source: flickr.com
The Future of Green Energy & Social Initiatives
With threats of peak everything (oil, iron, food, water) looming large and the subsequent potential cost increases and resource restrictions, the incidence of green group initiatives is set to only increase in the coming decades as communities organize themselves around common causes and goals. In many ways, it’s a return to things as they used to be, which has many benefits. It brings us back into community with our neighbors, reduces resource consumption, cuts energy and water use, and teaches us how to source and produce products and services in our own neighborhoods.
Sources
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/car_sharing
2. http://www.enactwi.org/index.php?page=how-enact-works
3. http://www.theage.com.au/national/gardening-guerillas-in-our-midst-20081209-6v06.html
4. http://ecycler.com/ccheck.php
5. http://groups.google.com/group/plasticbagfree?pli=1
6. http://plasticisrubbish.wordpress.com/category/05-solutions/plastic-free-campaigns/
7. http://sayiamgreen.com/blog/2009/09/pay-attention-get-active-conserve-water/
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