If you haven’t heard, they are already signing up people for Blog Action Day 2008 and the topic this year will be on Poverty. If you are a blogger and have thoughts to share on the topic of poverty, go sign up now! The only requirement is that you do a post on October 15, 2008 on the topic of poverty. I posted last year for Blog Action Day and the topic was the environment.
My post last year was called Rock. Paper. Scissors. How Do We All Win? I wrote about ways we could reduce the amount of paper we use by cutting down the paper we receive. Since last year, I called up and cancelled several of the catalogues that we randomly received, made sure we were getting e-statements instead of paper statements, etc. We have drastically reduced the amount of unnecessary mail we get, but we still get things that I haven’t figured out how to stop getting! But I’ll keep on trying.
Check it out, sign up, and share your entrepreneurial and parent related thoughts about poverty!
My thoughts are with the people living through the worst wildfires in the history of California. I have family in the area and they have been fortunate enough to at least temporarily escape the smoke and debris. I can’t imagine what the other families are going through. Many have lost their homes. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land have been burned. Remarkably, only a few people have been injured.
The LA Times has created a map of the fires here. Someone on YouTube posted a NASA video of the view of the smoke from space here. You can see a YouTube video of the fires from the San Diego coast line here and here.
As an outsider looking in what I find interesting is how often the News compares this disaster to Hurricane Katrina. Last night on 20/20 the reference came up numerous times. They mentioned how much smoother the FEMA response to this wildfire disaster has been compared to the hurricane Katrina disaster. How much more organized temporary shelters in places like Qualcomm stadium has been. They also kept mentioning all the celebrities who have lost homes in the area (who I’m assuming all have property insurance).
As I understand it, the wildfires were caused by a power line that sparked as it fell and that spark was fanned by the extreme Santa Ana winds. What devastation a spark can bring! In Louisiana (where they just elected a new governor) the devastation and chaos was brought on by water.
There are so many mixed thoughts and emotions that come up when comparing these two disasters one hardly knows where to begin. Two different elements (fire and water) in two different US cultures (West and South) having two dramatically different results. Since I can’t begin to analyze with sophistication the two happenings in time, here is a little poem (simple I know) I just came up with that I thought I’d share:
Wildfires rage through the night Filling people, animals, and trees with fright The ocean water is nearby But useless in the current fight
When water spurns up in a rage All we are left with is a wet history page Of life searching for the light But the bright red fire is useless in our watery cage
– (c) Aruni Gunasegaram, October 24, 2007 4:30 p.m. CST
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the amount of paper we use and come in contact with from newspapers, magazines, bank/credit card/mutual fund statements, printed paper, kids crafts, etc. I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite some time but either didn’t have the time or wasn’t sure how to approach the topic but after writing a first draft down on October 5, 2007, I happened upon a post called What Have You Done Lately? by Lorelle on Wordpress the very next day! Her post led me to Blog Action Day, and I though ‘Holy Trees Batman,’ this is why I am supposed to write this post despite my Bloggo Fears that people will think I’m nuts or possibly a Tree Hugger! And now because of Blog Action Day I have found the reason to do this post today, October 15, 2007.
I was motivated to write this post because I have been attempting to clean up my home office and the paper shuffling has been at an all time maximum. I like to make space and get a sense of openness before embarking on a strategic thinking endeavor…which I am in the process of doing regarding the future direction of Babble Soft. Boy do I wish we lived near a beach…because something about sitting under a huge umbrella, staring at the ocean, and listening to the waves with a margarita in my hand would really help get my thinking juices flowing!
I have seen some things written about reducing the amount of paper used in office environments such as:
But I haven’t seen much written about how each of us as individuals can help reduce the amount of paper products we come in contact with on a daily basis. I did see a post made by Tim Sanders called Redesign your reading life where he discusses ideas on how to reduce the amount of paper by changing how you read.
But what I’m proposing is slightly different. I have been looking at the things we don’t necessarily read and/or need to have a hard copy of. So here’s what I’ve decided to do, and I took action on the day I wrote the first draft of this post back on October 5.
I finally called Pottery Barn and told them to take me OFF their catalogue mailing list for their pottery barn baby and PB teen catalogues. I think I ordered one thing from them a few years ago and then somehow got on their catalogue mailing list. Every time I would get them I thought to myself I really ought to tell them to quit sending these to me, but I was always in the middle of something or I said to myself ‘oh, I’ll do it later’ and immediately put them into our recycle bin.
Now it’s great to recycle but what if I hadn’t even gotten those catalogues to begin with for the last few years? Would some trees have been allowed to continue growing? Would the additional oxygen they breathed into the environment have had an affect on our heated discussions on global warming? Would we have Cooler Heads?
Since I’m not a scientist and don’t play one on TV, I really have no proof indicating that this tree saving would happen but my gut tells me that reducing the amount of paper we receive can’t hurt. Also common sense tells me that record amounts of rain and 100 degree temperatures being more common than not here in Texas this past year are probably an indicator of something.
It took me literally less than 2 minutes to call Pottery Barn, give them the codes on the catalogues and they removed me. And you know what? She actually THANKED me for calling them to let her know! I have to say I was pleasantly surprised because I was half expecting her to ask me why I wanted to be removed, try to convince me to continue receiving them, and/or convince me to order something. Isn’t it funny how our assumptions of how we think something will happen might actually subconsciously dissuade us from taking immediate action?
So I’d like to challenge all of you to do something to reduce the amount of paper in your lives. If you share in the comments what you did that might give others more reason to examine their paper-filled life. If you are a blogger, I encourage you to post about this on your blog (please don’t feel like you have to link back to this post - I’m not writing about this for links) and let’s see if each of us making one small step to reduce the paper in our home lives can make a difference over time.
Canceling the catalogues to Pottery Barn was just the beginning, I still have a long way to go, and I’ll either update this blog or post about my progress in future posts. Here are some other ideas:
Change statements (financial, bank, etc.) to e-statements if possible
Cancel subscriptions to magazines you no longer read
Encourage places like pre-schools and private schools to send you receipts by email if they can
Ask people who want to fax you something to scan and email it to you instead and then save it instead of printing it if possible
Ask the post office if they can quit sending those coupon pages, fliers, etc. that you never use. I have no idea if it’s possible to have them quit sending bulk mail, but I guess it can’t hurt to ask.
If anyone has any other ideas, please share them! If any of you have already posted on this topic, please let me know and I’ll update this post to refer to it.
One small action could quite possibly lead to a phenomenal reaction! How will we ever know if we don’t try….
I, along with thousands of bloggers around the world, will be writing a post related to the environment on October 15, 2007. Check out the Blog Action Day site and see how you can get involved. They have even created a nice video about it on YouTube:
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