Little list of simple things we can do :)

• recycle everything & get your friends to recycle

recycling reduces pollution and saves national resources, including our beautiful trees that absorb carbon dioxide.
If 100,000 people who currently don't recycle begin to do so, they would collectively reduce carbon emissions by 42,000 TONS per year.

• bring your own cup to a coffee shop and re-fill your metal water bottle

• bring your own cloth bag to the grocery store (read more)

Americans alone use more than 12 MILLION barrels of oil each year just to produce plastic grocery bags that end up in landfills after only ONE USE and then take CENTURIES to decompose. 15 MILLION TREES are cut down annually to produce the 10 BILLION paper bags we go through each year in the U.S. alone. So when they ask you, paper or plastic, say NEITHER :)

• buy products with minimal packaging & re-use things

• buy 100% recycled paper towels/toilet paper

(harder to find in a regular store, try Trader Joe's or Whole Foods). No Kleenex or other Kimberly-Clarke products, they cut down beautiful forests to make something for blowing our nose in!

• vote for politicians who will fight for our health and our environment

• use fluorescent light bulbs

(if every household in the U.S. substituted even ONE conventional light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, it would have the same effect on pollution levels as removing a MILLION CARS from the nation's roads!!!) When these long-life bulbs do finally reach the end of their life, please recycle them since they contain mercury (not good in landfills).

• buy bio-degradable detergent (my favorite places are Trader Joe's and Whole Foods have great choices!)

• buy organic food or food with no preservatives or artificial ingredients, no high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated oil, etc :)

(chemicals used in modern agriculture pollute the water and require energy to produce, plus they're horrible for us)
The book FAST FOOD NATION was an eye-opening book for me (recommended to me back in 2004 by producer Jack Douglas)

• read news online to save paper, learn more about the issues & become active (I love The Sierra Club & NRDC).
P.S. if you watch An Inconvenient Truth, you might be able to see me in the audience :)