Eco-tips #1: Stuff you can do for the environment
Three tips that you can use to help our biosphere!
I’m usually a bit pessimistic about our negative contribution to the environment, so I’ve decided to start a little series on tips for you to help the environment.
This series will be called Eco-tips and it will be interspersed here and there in issues of this newsletter. I’ll try and release at least three of them per month so that you can discover new ways to protect ecosystems!
1. Avoid deforestation investments
A lot of people have their retirement funds in mutual funds or ETFs, and if you have some sort of managed retirement fund, I bet you do too. Unfortunately, a lot of companies are not environmentally friendly and so I suggest divesting from them.
To help you do this, there’s a cool tool called Deforestation Free Funds. You can search for the funds in your savings account and check if any companies within the fund contribute to deforerstation.
I wouldn’t just recommend using this tool, but also doing your own research to discover exactly how your money is being invested. The more people that pull out of environmentally unaware companies, the more we can starve them of funds and help prevent deforestation.
Of course, you should also research the products you buy and see how they are produced. Check out this BBC article for some ideas.
2. Has your country signed the UN High Seas Treaty?
The UN High Seas Treaty is a monumental step forward for the environment and at the time of this writing, 84 countries have signed it. It’s a new treaty designed to protect the oceans and international waters from dangers like hunting rare species and over-fishing.
You can check out if your country signed the treaty, and if not, then you can write to your government and complain.
For example, it’s rather embarrassing that my home country Canada has not signed the treaty! If they do intend to sign it, they are being rather stupidly slow about it. If you’re Canadian, get to complainin’.
3. Just consume less
As I always recommend, find ways to consume less stuff or find less resource-intensive things as replacements.
I know it’s a little disappointing to see how little individual contributions make, but that’s only when you look at them through the engineering lens of numbers and calculations. Individual contributions are important for more than just lowering a number—individual contributions cultivate an attitude of respect towards the environment.
And, propagating an attitude of respect towards our biosphere is as important as reducing raw numbers, because without a healthy and respectful attitude, no one will pitch in to reduce raw numbers.
So, while eating less meat and switching to local produce yourself won’t make a large dent, it will make an impression on the people around you. And let’s say you know twenty people, and each of them knows twenty people. That’s already almost four hundred people that have the chance to be influenced by your attitude and seriousness towards conservation!
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