Let the Earth breathe

First, allow me to greet you all a happy hoppy Easter. How did you celebrate Easter Sunday? I hope you had a meaningful Holy week.

Our planet is a wonderful place to live in. God created the Earth and most of us know that only God can also destroy it. But what if someone would say that our planet would not last long because of how we abuse Mother Earth, would you believe them? A few days ago, I saw that #lettheearthbreathe have been trending because of a NASA climate scientist breaks out in a desperate call to stop fossil fuels and act on climate crisis. He protested along with some climate activists but got arrested for speaking up the truth. Sad reality. They said that we would only have 3-5 years left if we are not going to start saving the planet. If you have watched the movie, Don't Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, you can say that it has slight similarities.

It was just recently when I have published an article on being the change that we want to see the world and here are some scientists and activists doing protests. Honestly, I have no knowledge about fossil fuels but I am pro environment. I bet majority of us would agree that we are definitely experiencing climate change as days go by. Here in the Philippines, summer starts during March but due to climate change, we sometimes experience it early February. Rainy seasons are during the months of June to August however, this year it started as early as April. 2 typhoons just for this month. Can we already say that it is due to climate change? Yes! If before summer has been extremely hot and dry, now summer has been a little gloomy in some areas while it has been flooding in some. I am not going to lie but I love weathers that has a combination of hot and cold. I have not been to Los Angles, California but I know I am going to like the weather there as described by my aunt. I am also a pluviophile. I love the rain and I find peace during rainy days but a part of me is sad whenever I know that there are people that are being affected by flood. But we all know that the floods are caused by deforestation and improper waste disposal. 

When I looked up #lettheearthbreathe, I saw a lot of tweets and comments on how we can help save our planet. There was a certain tweet that got my attention and it was to delete unread or unwanted emails to save Mother Earth. Did you know about that because it was the first time that I have heard about it? I got curious so I researched about it and found out that all of our emails that we kept and do not read contribute to carbon emissions. Still not getting the bigger picture? Do not worry because you are not alone. I still read until I got the connection of keeping a lot of emails to the environment. As it turns out, all of our emails are stored in a cloud storage. We all know that there is a storage limit in every email account and the more emails, the bigger the softwares. And more softwares or servers would require a lot of electricity and most electricity is generated through fossil fuels. I am not an expert on such things and I just explained what I have understood from some sites so correct me if I am wrong. Who would have thought that the advancement of technology would contribute that big to carbon footprint. So deleting emails that are not important means we are also deleting even a little carbon dioxide. Any small would eventually become big. I am pretty sure you also have a lot of unread and not so important emails in your account. I am guilty of having a lot of emails on my inbox that are unread as I have more than 5,000 and that is only on one of my main email address that I have used since college. To let the Earth breathe, I am deleting maybe not all but some of them and I hope you do too.

Another one that caught my attention is to use ECOASIA or OCEANHERO as a search engine sites as both sites help save our planet. Ecoasia uses the ad revenues that they get from our searches by planting trees while for every 5 searches we do on Oceanhero, we recover 1 plastic bottle. I have been using Google as a search engine site since college but Yahoo was the very first search engine that I have used. I just changed to Google because it showed better results compared to Yahoo before. So I would not mind switching to Ecoasia or Oceanhero if it is for the betterment of our planet. Although it takes some time to get used to it especially I find Ecoasia a bit slower as if I was on a dial up internet connection.

I think we all know other basic things to do to save Mother Earth like save electricity and unplug appliances that are not in use. I have learned make these 2 a habit during the pandemic since my dad has been complaining that he is the only one paying our utilities and his pension money is not enough for us for a month because of the increase in basic commodities. Conserving water has been something that I have been doing for many years now. I would also collect greywater to flush the toilet or to clean the places where our dogs peed and pooped. I also do collect rainwater to water the plants or clean our surroundings.

We did plant some fruit bearing plants but only chili, basil, spring onion and mint were the only ones that did grow. I do not have a green thumb as I do have hot or warm hands as my mom would say it. Others say that it means you are good in cooking and others say that you are a warm person. I can still remember the water spinach that I planted last year. It died. LOL. But I still want us to plant some fruit bearing plants so we can save a little.

Let me know how you help save our environment. There are a lot of ways that we can do to help save our planet. Even refusing a single use plastic packaging is already a big help to our Mother Earth. I hope that all of us should be focusing on our environment now more than ever. Let us all be part of the solution and not the problem. Let us help Mother Earth to breathe again just like how she did during the start of the pandemic. It may have been for a shortwhile but many of us have noticed that we have been breathing a cleaner air during those times. If we show our love and care to Mother Earth, she will also show her love and care for all of us.

April 17, 2022

P.S. lead image is a screenshot from my GCash Forest. I get to save energy and plant tree by using the app. I have already planted 3 trees. Hooray!