Mother Earth is all we have to live on, and her beauty escapes us every day. The majority of the harm done to Earth is not from day-to-day life, but from corporations with no environmental ethics. Nonetheless, we can still work hard to keep our planet as healthy as possible.
- STOP USING AI
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In the last few years, generative artificial intelligence use has gotten way out of hand. I feel like every time I tell someone they shouldn’t use AI, they come up with an excuse: “I only use it for X reason,” “I only use once it a week/day/hour for such and such.” I feel I’m screaming at a brick wall.
The only reasoning that seems to slightly get through to these people are the facts: AI is draining our clean water and using so much energy that its causing our Earth and our fellow humans to go thirsty. The Environmental and Energy Institute has a detailed study on why it’s causing so much damage to our livelihoods, but my main reason is the fact that humans are not getting clean, drinkable water; a robot is.
If you haven’t already, and if you want to help our planet, you should stop using AI. Hopefully, with people using it less and less, we can make enough of a difference in AI consumption that Earth will start to heal.
- STOP SHOPPING FAST FASHION
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Fast fashion refers to companies like SHEIN, TEMU, and so on that use cheap materials, and often, awful labor practices. Cheap materials like polyester rip, tear, wear-down, and fade fast. This leads to people throwing away more and more clothing just to buy more.
Buying from these companies and others like them incentivizes them to produce more and more waste. By not buying from these places and choosing sustainable alternatives, you can help diminish clothing waste and prevent the fast fashion industry taking over the thrift stores, and eventually, the landfills.
- START MAKING ECO BRICKS
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A new discovery of mine in the sustainable living community is ecobricks. A lot of households are taking responsibility for the wasted space that plastic containers take up in trash cans and cutting down on that waste by making ecobricks.
To make an ecobrick, you just need a plastic bottle (like an apple juice bottle), which you slowly (or quickly) fill with leftover plastic trash until it’s so full that it’s as weighty as a brick. When you finally throw it away, instead of using an entire trash bag for all the loose plastic, you can condense it down and waste less trash space. This helps reduce the amount of space empty plastic containers take up in the trash and, by extension, the landfills. You’ll use fewer trash bags and eventually, hopefully, you can move on from plastic use.
These are just a few ways that you can use to help our great big earth become greener and greener, even if it’s only one step at a time. Our planet has given us so much, and it’s our responsibility to give back to her as much as we can even with outside forces weighing us down.
Give something back to the earth today by using these tips and celebrate Earth Day by gardening or planting some new plants for her. Happy Earth Day!