Day 237 of our Green Year: World Community Grid

One of the greatest innovations of the past few years for technology has been the use of grid computing. This type of computing uses the power of thousands or millions of computers to generate the same processing power as super computers. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) uses this with their SETI @Home program. This program works as a screen saver on your computer so that while you are away from your computer, the program will process information from SETI radio files. This allows SETI to go through many times more information than they ever could alone.

Harvard has picked up on this and created the World Community Grid. The World Community Grid uses the same principle of SETI @Home, but it uses the processing power of grid computing to process information to help make the world a better place. One item that they are working on with the help of grid computing is creating cheap and powerful solar power cells. If these were to become widespread, it would change the way we power our civilization. Therefore, Layla and I have joined the World Community Grid so our computers can be used to help process information to make the world a better place and to help the environment. When we are away from the computer for a short period of time, we turn on our screen saver to handle the processing. We put our computers to sleep when we are not using them, but going to the washroom or getting coffee is the perfect time to put on the screen saver.

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We did our weekly grocery shop today and it is quite amazing just how many organic items are now available. Layla and I are really astonished by the sheer number of organic items, including chocolate chip cookies, Oreo type cookies, popcorn and more. It makes our grocery shopping very easy when we only need to choose the organic items.

Our christmas shopping was done today, and while we can't say what was bought for obvious reasons right now, we did shop at local retailers, and we tried to buy as many green gifts as we could, while keeping how much we buy to a minimum.

Day 235 of our Green Year: Charitable Gifts

Gift giving is a big part of the holidays, but too often we will think of what we are getting and what we are getting for those we care about, over the needs of those who go without. Christmas is the time of giving and the time to think about your fellow man and woman and what they suffer through. Not everyone has gifts under the tree during Christmas, and not everyone has a Merry Christmas.

Therefore, for Layla and I, while we are buying local, green gifts this year, as well as limiting what we buy, we are also going to give to environmental charities and charities that help people in their day-to-day lives.

Why give to something other than a green charity? For Layla and I helping our fellow man and woman is also part of going green. Not everyone will agree and that is cool, but it is how we feel. Spreading the wealth and kindness can make others do the same. The happier people are, the greener they may be. We feel that we all share this world together, and if we are all helping each other, we will be more willing to help the environment. It is one reason why we use FreeRice.com. As well, instead of buying ourselves a gift that we probably don't need, we can give to a charity that helps send kids to school with the supplies they need so they can learn about the environment. At the same time, we can send more money to the World Wild Life Fund, Greenpeace or IFAW because we spent less on ourselves.

So, we have decided to give more money this year to green/environmental charities, as well as charities to help out kids and adults. Creating a better world for the environment, is about creating a better world for humans as well.

Day 234 of our Green Year: Our Christmas Dinner

Christmas dinner is often the highlight of Christmas for many people. It brings together a family after a day of presents and celebrating, to enjoy each others company and enjoy a great meal. Personally, I love making Christmas dinner, especially when it is turkey. However, for this green Christmas, we are not having turkey, or hens, or ham or any meat whatsoever.

In an effort to be green this year, we are doing what we do for the better part of each week, and that is eat veggie meals. This year, our Christmas dinner will be a vegetarian, and organic dinner for the entire family to enjoy.

I have cleared this with everyone and they all agree that it is a good idea to go with a veggie supper this year. Of course, if we had decided to have turkey, it would have been a free-range turkey, like we had for Thanksgiving.

Instead, there will be organic yams, organic peas, organic potatoes and more for the dinner that is completely meat-free.

Now the effort begins to find some interesting veggie holiday suppers to try.

Day 232 of our Green Year: Local Gifts

A few days ago, one of our Christmas pledges was to buy very few gifts instead of going hog-wild with shopping. Then, three days after that we pledged to buy green gifts that had little packaging, could be recycled and more. Well, today we are making another Christmas gift pledge to help the environment, and this one is to buy locally. Rather than go to Wal-Mart (which we have banned) or some other big department store, Layla and I are choosing to instead buy from local retailers. We are also going to go to the local Farmer's Market this weekend to buy some local gifts from local producers and suppliers.

When you buy a gift locally, you are helping your local economy as well as helping the environment because you do not need to have the gift transported from far away. We had originally thought of ordering gifts online, but the distance required to bring us the gifts would generate too much CO2 to ignore.

So, the main street retailers, Mom and Pop stores and Farmer's Market will be our shopping locations this year. At these locations, we will be buying green gifts and only a few gifts at that, to make this a green Christmas.

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I read some sad news on CNN today. It was about the drastic reduction in shark populations around the world. While the shark is seen as an unrelenting killer that hunts humans, this is far from the truth. While only a handful of people are killed or even attacked by sharks each year, millions of sharks are slaughtered by humans. The exact numbers are 10 people dying each year on average in a shark attack and 100,000,000 sharks dying at the hands of humans (according to CNN). Many sharks die so that people can pay as much as $100 for shark fin soup. This fashionable Chinese dish is becoming incredibly popular and that means bad news for the shark, which is a vital part of the ocean eco-system.
This is just wrong. Shark teeth have been dated to 400,000,000 years ago. Sharks were roaming oceans before plants were even colonizing land. The species survived the Dinosaur era, and even the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It survived ice ages and more, but it may not survive humans.

Day 217 of our Green Year: No Wrapping Paper

Well, we are one month away from Christmas here at the Baird ranch, and since Christmas is a time of year where waste is very common and the environment often takes a backseat, we are going to be featuring things we do each month to give ourselves a green Christmas. We have already decided to greatly scale back gift giving, and only giving items that go along with our green decisions this year. However, today is not about the gifts, it is about the things they come in.

Everyone loves to rip the wrapping paper off gifts, but really that is an incredibly wasteful thing to do. You are wrapping something, just for someone to rip it off. Then that wrapping paper is generally thrown away.

For Our Green Year Christmas Edition....we are not using wrapping paper, but instead are using things we have around the house already. We may wrap the gifts in newspaper, which can then be used to help start fires in our fireplace. We may also wrap gifts in towels from the closet, or just put them in the reusable bags that we already have.

Wrapping paper is fun, but wasteful, so come December 25, everyone here will be unwrapping towels, opening reusable bags or ripping open newspaper.