Sunday, May 9, 2010

Lets get started

There are many ways in which we all can pitch in to do something for our environment. Some of these measures include extra bit of effort and some involve a little bit of expenditure. This extra effort/expenditure is the reason which demotivates many people from doing anything for the environment even if they want to, but the truth is that this is just an excuse. They just take the cover of some of these measures which involve extra effort/expenditure. In reality people are just too lazy or too disinterested to adopt other measures which are inexpensive and hardly require any extra effort. In fact these habits if followed regularly might help you to save some money.

Here is a list of actions which each one of us can take without shelling out a single penny from our pockets:
  1. Turn off all lights and appliances when not in use. Even if you are going out of the room for 5 minutes do turn off the lights. It might seem to be a very small saving but remember ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Just consider saving 5 minutes of electricity consumed by a tube light daily for 365 days. 5 X 365 = 1825 minutes. Now is that small?
  2. Do not switch appliances to standby mode - switch them off. Appliances consume electricity even in standby mode. Again it might seem like a small saving but just like I said in the first example - ocean is made up of tiny drops of water.
  3. Unplug your appliance chargers one the device is charged because in spite of the device being fully charged the charger keeps on consuming electricity.
  4. Use public transportation whenever possible. Now with the pathetic state of public transportation in many Indian cities this might be hard to follow but try to follow this wherever feasible.
  5. Start a carpool with your colleagues. Now this is something which is eaisly in our hand and has many benefits. You won't have to drive to and back from office alone and more importantly you will end up saving quite a good amount of money
  6. Try to walk to a nearby store, park, gym, etc. instead of driving there by your car or bike. It will also be beneficial for your health :-)
  7. Do not use running water while brushing/shaving. If it cannot be avoided then turn on the tap only when you require it. It might take a little more effort to turn it on and off every time but it will definitely save a lot of water.

Confused about Gaia...

Okay, so many of you would be wondering about the title of this blog - GaiaONE.
Some of you might have already goggled the term, but for the rest of you who are too lazy for that also, let me briefly tell you about Gaia.

Gaia is the Greek goddess of the Earth. In other words the Greek version of Mother Nature.

It would be quite interesting to delve deeper into the greek mythology and explore further about Gaia, but I would leave that upto you and focus on the main theme of this blog. For those of you who would really like to know more about Gaia, here is the link to get you started - Wikipedia-Gaia.

Act and Act NOW...

Hi everyone, here I am with my second blog - GaiaONE.

Well to start with this time around I am going to write about a serious issue, which is today impacting all of us and if we all don't take some corrective steps today then it will impact our future generations to come and maybe even signal the death knell for our way of life as we know it today.

Through this blog I will be focusing on the problem of Global Warming and other issues which are related to it like energy and water conservation.

Global warming has become such an important issue that almost all of us know about it, read about it and discuss it, but rarely do we do anything about it. We have just restricted ourselves to complain about government policies and cursing the big industries. No one is trying to put his/her hand up, take responsibility for our MOTHER EARTH and do his/her bit to save this planet and more importantly save the human race.

Until a few years ago even I didn't care about these things, but maybe that was because I was in my own comfort zone, living in a cocoon away from real world (that is the bliss of childhood/school life and too certain extent college life - you don't have to worry about most of the things, your parents and elders are there to take care of everything), but today having matured enough to be a responsible citizen and a responsible human being I do think about these things and more importantly I do put into effect some things which might seem small, but which will make a big difference if we all start practicing them.

This blog is not to make you aware of this problem, we all are already aware of it. Main aim of this blog is to share the ideas and small corrective steps which we all can take, to heal our Earth. Even if 1% of the people reading this blog adopt these habits and further spread awareness amongst their families and friends, I would consider that the time and effort I spent on writing this blog was totally worth it.

Request you all to please read the following posts, think about them, discuss them, comment on them and above all try to make them a part of your daily life. After all as children of this Nature, this Earth we all owe at least this much to our MOTHER.