The Earth and You

Earth Day was last Wednesday. In past years it hasn’t seemed as big as it was this year. That could possible be because I was helping out at Earth Day on campus but every where I looked there were Earth Day ads. Almost every channel had their own campaigns to go green for the day. Nickelodeon advertised that for one minute every kid would turn off all of the electronics and lights in their house to show how much kids can affect the earth.
I thought all of these campaigns were a great idea. Earth Day reminds us that we are apart of something bigger then just humanity and that we need to take care of everything around us. But I started wondering if the effects of Earth Day would only last 24 hours. The things people did to help the Earth should be done every day not just for one. Most of the time they are only little things that can be done such as recycling everything you can, turning off the lights when you leave the room and changing the light bulbs so they don’t require as much electricity, cutting down your shower time be a minute or two. All of these things will help and they don’t require that you drastically change your life.
Also there are more things to learn about when it comes to the environment. There are things that we do that we wouldn’t think is actually hurting the environment. One of those things is light pollution. Light pollution is any adverse effects that come from artificial lights. An example of this is in a big city when you look up into the sky at night you can’t see the stars. Other forms of light pollution are lights that shine into someone’s window or property. At my house we have a light that is right above the back door it is supposed to according to my dad protect us against crime. It is really bright and a lot of the light shines onto our fence and into the neighbors yard. I’m working to fix our light pollution problem. You can fix light pollution by getting shields for your lights so they reflect down in a certain area and spreading out your lights so they aren’t in a concentrated area.
The more knowledge we get about the environment the better off we will be. We need to protect the only earth we have because once is gone we are gone.


To better understand light pollution follow this:
http://www.need-less.org.uk/simulator.html