Welcome to the October 6, 2008 edition of Cirque du Vert: Circus of the Green! After another short break, we’re excited to get rolling again with some fantastic articles from some of our best writers yet.

Wesley presents Four Way to Green your Wallet (and the Environment) posted at EnviroHumanImpact.  Wesley gives his top 4 common sense tips for saving money and the environment at a time where we find ourselves in a slowing economy and tightening purse-strings.

Jeremy presents HSBC offers hybrid for cardholders who go green posted at Taking Charge.  Jeremy tells us about HSBC running a contest for customers electing to receive only online statements.  The prize: a new 2008 Saturn Aura Hybrid!

Kristen McCarthy presents Community Gardens: Transform Urban Spaces posted at this-sustainable-life.com. Kristen mentions, “Traditionally, community gardens emerge in the most unlikely spaces: from dispossessed parking lots and abandoned railway lines, to hubcap strewn parks and needle plagued back alleys, to the sagging rooftops that overlook laundry lines stretched out across the cityscape in multifarious patterns. In these areas rejected and wasted from human-made decay, urban gardens are birthed.”

MBB presents Streamline Your Finances and Make Your Life Easier By Not Hoarding posted at Money Blue Book Finance Blog.  MBB gives a very comprehensive article on how avoiding excessive hoarding can streamline our lives and make us more efficient including ways to reduce our carbon footprint in the process.

Lauren Rose presents The Cultivation of Vegetables posted at Own Home Style .com. According to Lauren, “Nowadays due to the introduction of new hybrid varieties in vegetables, which are susceptible to pest and diseases, there is demand for more plant protection, usually with toxic chemicals.”

That concludes this edition.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of Cirque du Vert: Circus of the Green using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

While most are likely much more worried at this point whether or not their savings and investments will be worth much after this mess and still others wonder whether or not they will have food on the table or a roof over their head.  Still, even others already find themselves hungry and/or without a home.

While you may feel somewhat hopeless about the financial system at-large, there may be some small things you can do to both save money and improve your envirohuman impact simultaneously.  

1. Drive less.  Choose to walk, ride your bike, or use public transportation.  If you do drive, clean out all of that junk in your trunk.
2. Begin gardening.  Yes, winter is approaching, but if your climate is right, you may be able to sqeeze in a quick planting and harvest.  Ask your local nursery or garden shop.  Also, you can garden herbs year-round in pots on your window sill.  They’re attractive, smell nice, and spicing up your cooking does not get fresher than that!  Then, you will not be paying $4.00 for a small package of basil for your next batch of homemade pesto.  Seeds run for about a dollar a packet and often keep on giving!
3. If you eat meat regularly, skip meat completely for a day or two every week.  Notice how much that meat costs?  It can add a few dollars to a meal or even be the main cost.  In part, this is because there is a lot of energy input, in this case, food, for that chicken thigh to be nice and juicy.  But by finding ways to skip meat, you’re avoiding that cost and improving your envirohuman impact because the meat industry pollutes our air and water — especially the factory farms where most of the meat in the U.S. comes from.
4. Check your store for deals.  Find a good price?  Stock up.  Yeah, that’s personal finance 101, but it also means you’ll likely be driving to the store less, because more meals will be on the shelf.  Trying to go organic?  Great!  Whole Foods has a constant deal where if you buy a case of an item, let’s say, organic soup, which I bought the other day, you get 10% off.  Now, that may not seem like a lot, but I bought a case of soup at $2.69 per can with maybe about $0.27 off of each can.  So, compare my $2.42 can of soup for that effortless meal to your $15 (minimum) pizza delivery (delivered one meal at a time by someone driving a car) and you can see both the financial and environmental savings.  I had my soup boiling and was finished eating probably before your pizza even arrived!

I also was not there to stare at a crush of mine, although that happened.  I had no idea she was joining in the fun until I arrived.  Bonus!

I went to the beach, actually, to participate in a beach cleanup effort, organized by the Alliance for the Great Lakes.  I am not a janitor by trade and typically I would not have found picking up garbage out of sand and seaweed a great fun, but my increasing awareness of the hazards posed by water- and land-borne litter made this a fun activity.  The giant omelet and apple pancake afterward helped, too!  Plus the presence of a crush.

Almost needless to say, we made this a social function as well and you could almost forget that you were wearing rubber gloves, picking up discarded cigarette butts and glass fragments because you were with friends.  But what the results were suprising and brought the reality of the event back into focus.  I will share some, but first, consider that my group of four picked up about 800 cigarette butts in just three hours!  

Totals:

135 volunteers

203 pounds collected

78 plastic beverage bottles

121 glass beverage containers

126 beverage cans

125 cups, plastes, forks, knives, spoons

341 food wrappers

71 toys

12 crates

2 pallets

13 batteries

8 car parts

8545 cigarettes

WOW!  That was not the entire list, but just to give you an idea of some of the junk found on one beach!  

Why is this type of work so important?  Well, beside the facts that this garbage makes a beach both unsightly and unsafe, it can contribute to degraded environmental conditions for plants and wildlife.  Plastic can be so harmful for fish and birds that eat it.  

For more information regarding the dangers of garbage being tossed into our beaches and waterways, check out this news story and Wikipedia Entry:

Sea of Trash

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

I encourage readers to partake in some type of garbage cleanup activity where they live, because our collective efforts to keep garbage out of waterways can and will help alleviate this situation.  In the end, it may take toughter regulations and stiff penalties to get people to stop littering.