travelswithtam

Do you know how your Mother is doing? I am referring, of course, to our Mother Earth on this Earth Day, April 22, 2016. And she could be better. She could be a whole lot better.

I usually talk about the ocean on Earth Day, or wildlife. Today I’m going to give you a few truths about climate change, i.e. global warming. Did you know that the last eleven months have been the hottest on record? Our winter has been the warmest ever known. Did you know our temperature is 1.5 degrees warmer than it was in 1880? That may not seem like much, but it is. The sea level goes up 3.4mm a year. Arctic Ice is melting at 13.4 percent per decade. 287 billion metric tons of land ice melts a year. Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (which heats the earth) has gone up 403.28 parts per million. A new study came out recently about the Earth’s wobbling axis, showing that the Earth’s spin axis has taken an abrupt turn toward the east and is drifting 7 inches per year, twice as fast as it was. Long story short? Ice mass loss. If you want the full story, go to NASA Climate News. (It is useless to try to convince anyone that global warming is real. If a person is really so dense that they cannot recognize fact when they see or hear it, they aren’t going to listen to me.)

You can get facts from many places. National Geographic has a stunning article about deforestation and its ties to the warming planet, Climate Central (dot) org has article after article about our rising temps and rising sea level, and NASA has infographics, charts, and pictures to show the devastation. NASA also has three new Climate Apps where you can track the changes occurring on our Mother Earth, and hopefully learn to do something about it. Earth Now gives you the vital signs of our warming planet home, Images of Change shows photographs of what is occurring, and Offset is a new game that is totally retro as it is similar to the old game Pong. Offset educates and teaches us about the global carbon cycle and how we can Offset it. Here is the link to the apps for your Apple and Android: http://climate.nasa.gov/earth-apps/. I’ve downloaded all of them, and I hope you will, too!

So what can you do? What can we do? The person who works for a living, has to get to work, doesn’t have time to march and study the causes and effects of climate change? I’m going to go to Dr Jane Goodall for the answer, and it is a very simple thing: stop eating meat of any kind for one day a week. Buy only cage free, farm fresh eggs. Try to buy grass fed, and non factory farmed meats. Factory farming is a major source of global warming. So, what will not eating meat one day a week do for us?

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save: 

— 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;

— 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;

— 70 million gallons of gas — enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;

— 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;

— 33 tons of antibiotics

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

— Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;

— 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;

— 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

— Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

Jane’s favorite statistic: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?(http://www.alternet.org/story/134650/the_startling_effects_of_going_vegetarian_for_just_one_day)

Your choices matter. Your every day choices matter tremendously. Can we all pledge to not eat meat one day a week? It is just one day a week! It would make such a huge difference! So this Earth Day I ask you to make a pledge: Do Not Eat Meat One Day a Week. Sign the petition and share it on all of your Social Media!

Enter the earth friendly Reef Safe Suncare Giveaway right now! woot! http://tamtravels.wpengine.com/comes-summer-will-love-reef-safe-sun-care-giveaway/

And have a Happy Earth Day!