Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Happy Earth Day, everyone!!

I didn't do a thing for it today today, other than tend the garden. But my mom is a science teacher, so she had a great ecological curriculum for today. She taught about the benefits of recycling, hanging laundry to dry outside rather than using a dryer, using reusable bags for groceries rather than paper or plastic, and how solar power works. She said the kids really seemed into it, and she was surprised by the number of kids who said their parents use the reusable bags and hang their laundry out.

Also all the public and charter schools in our county planted at least 38 trees given to them by the forestry service in honor of the 38th Earth Day. Nearly 6,000 trees (FTW! \o/) were planted between 11am - 12pm all over the county by kids and their teachers. Makes me all kinds of happy! The Guinness Book of World Records people were here to monitor the event, and the school system here now holds the record for most trees planted in a day and in a single hour. I hope this becomes a tradition and when they run out of space to plant trees at the schools, they can plant them elsewhere - places where there are erosion problems, etc. - and maybe things other than trees, like mangroves, sea grapes, and sea grasses along the bay and coast to help rebuild the estuaries in Tampa Bay and prevent erosion on the barrier islands, and go on field trips to study various ecosystems and maybe do clean-up projects. That would be cool...

2 comments:

La Duchesse said...

Don't feel bad. I didn't, either. I think the only thing even remotely green I did was... to go around turning off lights that weren't really necessary.
Yay for more trees and yay for the school systems doing something to teach the kids the importance of being in tune with nature!

RaeS said...

Yeah, the final count on the trees was actually approximately 10,000, but apparently this wasn't actually enough for the Guinness Book people... Odd, I thought. But it was an excellent project, and other than that, it went off very well. Yay!!!