An Effort in Green

Depending on where you live and the source of your electricity, decreasing your electricity usage can be a major way to decrease your impact on the environment. This is especially true if you live somewhere where coal is still used to power your home. But even here in Manitoba where we use the relatively clean hydroelectric power, more electricity used means more dams eventually being built, which means destruction of habitat. So unless you're living totally off the grid with a roof full of solar panels, you could definitely do some good by cutting down on the electricity. So in today's post I'll talk about two really easy ways to cut down on your electricity usage.

Probably one of the easiest things you can do to save electricity is simply to stop things in your home from using electricity when you're not even using them. If you've done a lot of reading about green living, you've probably heard the term "energy vampire". An energy vampire is an appliance that uses electricity even if it's turned off, as long as it's plugged in. You can sometimes identify these things by their lights that exist just to tell you they're plugged in.

This is an easy problem to solve. Simply unplug things when you're not using them! Or, if you don't even want to go to that much effort, do what I do and use power bars for everything. I have a power bar in my room that has my CD player, several lava lamps that I hardly ever use, my Christmas tree-style lights, my laptop, my cell phone, and my camera plugged into it, though not all at the same time. When I'm not using any of them, I just turn off the power bar, and everything is instantly unplugged! You could have a similar setup where you plug in your TV, video game consoles, and DVD player, as long as the DVD player isn't also your clock.

Another easy place to cut down on electricity is your computer. Obviously, the biggest thing you can do is turn it off at night, or whenever you're not going to be using it for quite a while. And when you do leave it on, change your settings to put the computer to sleep quickly, rather than using a screensaver.

Alternatively, when your computer is on but you aren't using it, you could use that electricity to help a good cause, by signing up at the World Community Grid! With their program, your computer can use its idle CPU time to contribute to good causes by doing computations. One of the projects you can contribute to is the Clean Energy Project, so you could even be helping to improve solar power technology! So it's really a win-win.

I went strawberry picking on Saturday, for the first time since I was a little kid going berry-picking with my grandma. I picked four pails of strawberries, and decided to try my hand at jam-making. Through much asking of questions, I learned that there is a type of jam called freezer jam (or no-cook jam), which is like regular jam, but way easier to make! It doesn't involve any sterilising of jars or cooking of fruit. The trade-off is that it only lasts a few weeks in the fridge, or up to 8 months in the freezer, as opposed to the years you get with cooked jam.


So, when I got home, I went to the grocery store and bought some pectin. It came with detailed instructions. In less than an hour, I had six jars and two plastic containers full of strawberry jam sitting on the kitchen table to set before being put in the freezer. To show you how easy it was, I'll share the process I used, though the specifics may vary with the brand of pectin you buy.

First, you wash the strawberries and cut off the tops. That's the biggest part of the work. Luckily, my mom did it for me. Yay moms!


Next, it's time to mash the strawberries! This is the fun part. It works best in a really big, wide bowl, like this popcorn bowl I used.


Then you mix the fruit with the sugar. In the recipe I used, it was two cups of mashed strawberries and four cups of sugar. I think those measurements are fairly constant across recipes, or at least the proportion is. Once this is thoroughly mixed, let it stand for 10 minutes.


The pectin I bought was in crystal form, so it had to be mixed with water and boiled, stirring constantly, for one minute. Pectin can also be bought in liquid form. In that case, I'm not sure what happens here. I imagine it would still need to be heated up, anyway.


The hot pectin is then poured into the fruit and sugar mixture. Stir for three minutes, and voila! The jam is ready to be poured into jars or other freezer-safe containers! Then, it needs to sit out at room temperature for 24 hours to set. Here's my final product:


Overall, it was a pretty fun experience! I'll definitely be making jam on a yearly basis now. Of all the foods you can make at home to avoid the packaging and the carbon footprint caused by the food's travel, freezer jam has to be one of the easiest.

There are a lot of sites out there now where you can generate donations to various charities just by clicking a button. I think this is a really neat concept. Basically, this is how it works: You click a button. You are shown advertisements on the thank you page. The advertisers pay for this advertising by giving money to a charity. Yay!

Here are 3 sites that I visit every day to contribute my clicks:

• A Click For the Forest
  
  • A Swedish organisation that raises money to buy old growth forests, to protect them from logging.
  • You can usually get there through the easier-to-remember link http://www.aclickfortheforest.com, but every now and then the redirect is broken so it's good to have the actual url.
• The Rainforest Site
  
  • Click to protect rainforests. Through the tabs at the top of the page, you can get to the other free click pages to fight hunger, fund breast cancer research, promote child health, support literacy programs, and rescue animals.
• Care2 Click To Donate
• Care2 is an online community of people who care about various causes. It includes a news network, petitions, groups, and even webmail.
• You can click here for 11 causes and counting, including big cats, oceans, rainforests, and more. There is also a daily action, which might be a petition, or just an article for you to read.

These are my three favourites, but there are many more sites out there where you can give a few seconds of your time to raise money for charities. All you have to do is look for them. So, go on, and get clicking! And I hope to see you around on Care2.