The first thing I did today to celebrate Earth Day was to look over our budget and finally switch completely over to locally grown and organic food. I'm not completely 100 mile diet yet, but considering that Spud tells me that my food comes from an average of 473 km away, or 293 miles, I'm getting pretty close. Part of the problem is that lots of that food has to come from the mainland and has to take a ferry. The average distance for most people's food is 1500 miles so I feel pretty good!

Making that choice also decreased my global foot print from 2.17 earths to 1.48, even though we're not vegetarian. I think if we were vegetarian that would go down even more. We've done a couple of other things to reduce our footprint as well, including choosing cloth diapers, all natural cleaning products and we made all our bills paperless - in fact we barely use paper anymore and hardly get mail - and it all gets recycled anyway.

It's quite amazing what you can do in a little inefficient old house in the city (ha ha, as I was writing this, I realized I had the windows open and the heat came on - horrors!).

Other than that we aren't doing too much else to celebrate Earth Day except housecleaning and spending some time outside. Next year will be the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, which is amazing to me because I don't remember it always being such a big deal. You can ready about the history on Wikipedia.

I think perhaps if I can get my work done we'll go outside and the girls and I will take a nature survey in the backyard. This is just a survey of all the species that you have living in your own little habitat. We need to get our backyard a little less wild, but I want to keep some of it a haven for birds, squirrels and other little critters. Except slugs - we have plenty of those, lol.