What You Can Do To Live Greener In Your House
Changes in individual behavior, by themselves, will not hold off catastrophe, but will reduce emissions, spread awareness of the climate-change crisis among people we come in contact with, and, if our numbers are great enough, exert pressure on corporations and government.

GETTING STARTED
We start with this miscellaneous list of fairly easy things arranged in no particular order. We will, in the near future, move on to more systematic lists and more challenging things. We welcome suggestions from you. Please e-mail them to yard2prairy@aol.com.

1. Change your incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents, which use less energy. (Over its lifetime, a compact fluorescent saves a ton of CO2.)
2. Cut down on air travel. Planes emit huge amounts of CO2.
3. Use cloth bags for shopping, thus saving trees and fossil fuel, plus the energy used in manufacturing and transporting paper and plastic bags to stores and eventually to landfills. Landfills emit methane, a greenhouse gas even worse than CO2. Almost all the plastic produced in the last 50 years is still with us, in the oceans, in the earth, in the air, in your body. Plastic is choking the life from the oceans and the land.
4. Drink tap water rather than water sold in plastic bottles. Tap water must meet higher standards of purity than bottled water; plastic bottles are made from oil (and are not designed for safe reuse); and water belongs to us all and should not be treated as a commodity.
5. Eat as organically, locally, and seasonally as you can. The energy costs of producing and transporting the fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides used on nonorganic crops - and of transporting food grown in far-off places to your grocery store - are enormous.
6. Eat less meat, whose disadvantages include its high cost in terms of water, land, and energy.
7. Take showers instead of baths. A bath uses about 3 times as much water as a 5-minute shower. Install a low-flow showerhead, which cuts water usage from about 5 gallons a minute to 2.5 gallons, and aerators on your faucets. Scarcity of usable water will accompany climate change.
8. Use paper sparingly. The production of paper consumes trees, requires great amounts of energy, and produces toxic waste. Use both sides of computer paper and note paper. Use scrap paper for scratch paper.
9. Join Consumers Power's Green Generation - Renewable Energy Program in order to receive as much energy from renewable sources as Consumers is currently able to supply. This will raise your energy bill slightly, but it will support renewable energy production in Michigan.
10. Don't buy products, e. g., furniture, that may have been harvested unsustainably from Indonesian or Amazonian rainforests. Deforestation currently produces about 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions - "more than all the cars and trucks in the world," in the words of Thomas Friedman. Loss of habitat, whether through urban and suburban sprawl or deforestation, is currently the main cause of species extinction.
11. Drive efficiently and only when necessary. "Bundle" errands, but walk, cycle, or use public transportation whenever possible. Resist impulsive car trips to the grocery store or mall to pick up a single item you don't really need or don't need immediately. When driving, take energy-saving measures: drive smoothly and don't let your car engine idle for longer than a minute. Turn it off.
12. Turn off lights/radios/televisions /stereos/computers when not actually in use. If possible, plug appliances with a clock, digital timer, remote control, or standby mode, into a power strip; so that they can be turned off completely.
13. Exert pressure on all levels of government to respond quickly and effectively to the threat of climate change. Also, urge legislators to resist the lure of biofuels and instead support the use of energy produced by wind and sun. Growing enough corn or switchgrass to make a significant different in our reliance on fossil fuels will devastate wildlife habitat in the U. S., to say nothing of driving food prices way up.
14. Start reducing the size of your lawn - heaped up dead leaves will kill the grass and enrich the soil - so that you can start filling your yard with a diversity of native plants in order to support native wildlife. For help in this effort, write Kalamazoo Area Wild Ones, P. O. Box 20324, Kalamazoo 49019; visit www.for-wild.org (website of the national Wild Ones organization); or e-mail yard2prairy@aol.com or davewndlng@aol.com.