Going Green in Comfort

Image by Bela Geletneky  from Pixabay I've been thinking about all of my blogs — I actively manage three, though I have had as many as five going at once — and I think it's time for me to rework the mission of this one. After initially focusing on ways to live greener, I have found that my posts have become mostly about climate change news. The fact is, there is tons of climate news out there, and it's highly unlikely that any readers who stumble across this site will be looking for news. I still want to occasionally include news, but I want to get back to my original purpose in writing this blog — focusing on ways to live a more Earth-friendly life. To help focus my brain and my posts, this blog has a new title. In the coming weeks, old content will moved or removed as well. Welcome to Going Green in Comfort!

When I was in college, I used to go for drives to clear my head before I had a paper to do or before I sat down to study. The school I attended was three hours from my hometown, so, especially at first, I would just marvel at the landscape. The area where I grew up was full of trees and tall hills; the landscape surrounding college was, by comparison, incredibly flat. Any elevations were smaller, "rolling," I believe is the term most often used. Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels It was on one of those drives that I saw a most unusual hill. It was taller and in kind of a pyramid shape, unlike the other rolling ones in the area. Squares of sod grass covered it, which was obvious as each square seemed to be a different shade of green. This, I could tell, was not a natural feature of the landscape. As I wondered what is was and why it was there, I saw a sign that told me all I needed to know; this behemoth out in the middle of the prairie was the county landfill. Buri...

Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash Amid the stories in my Facebook feed of how deadly Covid-19 was in China and its progression to other nations, was this map: NASA and European Space Agency This shows the nitrogen dioxide — most commonly produced by automobiles and power and industrial facilities — in the air over China from before the Covid-19 quarantines began to a period during the emergency measures. The difference is startling, and as the virus spreads and other governments enact similar quarantines, more nations will also see a drop in nitrogen dioxide until the crisis passes. Since I first saw this comparison, I’ve wondered if this might be the silver lining in an otherwise devastating epidemic? Could this sudden drop in what people continuously pump into our atmosphere buy us more time to make permanent environment-friendly behavior changes? An ABC News story posted March 5, 2020, is not encouraging on this front. Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at...