The Elevator

Changing one's habits and helping to create a better world cannot be done in one dramatic fell swoop. It must be done in tiny bits or baby steps.

A key component in making the entire Universe a better place is making oneself better. This includes but is not limited to: attending to physical, mental and emotional health, nurturing the spirit,and improving overall behavior to be more in harmony with honesty, truth, respect and positive energy.

Helping to be less consumptive can help accomplish many of the above listed things. There are many ways to reduce the use of consumable energy and increase the amount of your own physical energy but one quite simple way is to use the stairs.

I work in an office building where the majority of the workers are overweight. I hear them complain about their weight often and listen to the silly diets they go on to reduce. When the diets don't work or the weight is gained back immediately after the diet is discontinued they whine. Every single one of these people uses the elevator to go up and down in the office building.

The hilarious thing is that the building is only three stories tall. That means that In our building 50% of the occupants only go up or down one floor. How silly is that? One flight! They can't walk down ONE FLIGHT OF STAIRS?

Not only do these people waste consumable energy by taking the elevator but they are missing an opportunity to add a little more physical activity into their day. By adding a little more physical activity into their day they could start the process of burning more calories and loose weight without changing their current eating habits. I try to explain to them that they can begin by using the stairs when they go down floors if going up the stairs seems too difficult at first. (I offer this advise after they ask me how I stay thin and what can they do to loose weight. I try to never give advise unless asked.)

This little change can do a lot for our planet and for ourselves.

Every able bodied person should use the stairs when practical.

Conservation Challenge for this week:
Start using the stairs to go down in a building four stories high or less. If you already do this start using the stairs to go up in buildings four floors high or less whenever possible.

Automatic Doors and Bad Parenting skills

Dear Blog Readers,

Yesterday I promised to share a pet peeve with you and I will after I make a statement that is part of my truth:

It is paramount to do what we can to conserve energy in order to train ourselves and our children to live more responsibly and sustainability on this planet. As a benefit, many of the small things we can do to conserve energy require more use of our physical bodies thus burning more calories and helping to solve another crisis in the US- obesity.

Now the peeve story:

I belong to a wonderful community center. It serves a variety of people in a variety of ways. One of which is daycare for pre-school and school aged children. Another is several support groups and activities for senior citizens. It is a great place and I love that my family is a part of this community.

I visit the community center about five times a week. Almost every time I go there is a parent with a small child encouraging their child to hit the blue handicapped access button and open the door electronically. This infuriates me because 1) it uses electricity un-necessarily, 2) It trains the child to use the automatic door rather than to open the door manually which is part of the problem with the mindset of our culture.

It is great that the door can open electronically when a parent is struggling with a stroller or has their hands full and the child is too small to bear the weight of the door needing to use it. But really! Is it necessary to propagate this laziness for fun? I even hear parents providing positive reinforcement to the button pushers. We do not have to use the electronic door opener just because it is there. We can choose to act responsibly by not using it unless we have too.

Conservation challenge for today: Open the door with your own strength if you can and encourage your children to do the same.

Benefit: Children can learn the proper way to open the door for their elders (pull the door open and step behind the opened door to let an adult pass) which empowers them with social responsibility and old fashioned manners. It might also decrease the number of times elderly or handicapped people have to use the electronic door opener.

Other benefit: A simple way to reduce energy consumption. Burn a few more calories.

Yet another benefit: less wear and tear on the electronic door opening system which translates to less repairs and less cost.

In the Beginning

Daily I am confronted with areas in my life in which conservation would be a more appropriate choice. Whether it is conservation of my own actions or speech, conservation of energy (both the power grid type and personal)or conservation of thought. It seems to me that there is a ton of daily waste in our culture and that altering our behavior to a more conservative level is huge in our physical and mental survival on this planet.

I expect to gripe some about other people and their actions, offer helpful hints about living more simply, put in some calls for mental and emotional work and sometimes throw out some stats etc about helping the planet. This blog is called Planet Aid because we all need to "drink the cool-aid" of conservation to make the world a better place for all its inhabitants.

Tomorrow I will tell you about a pet peeve that reflects not only on our lazy wasteful behavior as a culture but is a bad parenting move as well.