Fill balloons with regular air and then hang them appropriately. Teach children ages 8 and up to blow up their own balloons, as they usually will find this to be more fun than using helium. Always pop balloons before throwing them away. Contact your local waste management office for proper disposal options.
Try eating less meat and dairy to help the environment. Domestic meat and dairy production requires a lot of natural resources. Eating less meat and dairy, and more plants, is one way you may be able to help the environment, and stay healthy yourself. Meatless Monday is a national non-profit public health campaign that encourages people to give up meat one day a week.
Visit their website at http: Brew coffee in a regular coffee pot or French press to reduce waste. Try to avoid drinking coffee from individual-serving coffee pods. The mini pods of ground coffee for single-serve coffee makers create a lot of extra waste because they are designed to only be used one time and then thrown out. Although some brands may be recycled after they are cleaned. If you love the convenience of single-serve coffee and have already invested in a single-serve machine, look for a washable, reusable coffee pod that will fit your appliance.
Buy your food locally to reduce pollution caused by transporting food. Transporting food from far-off locations takes a toll on the environment. Food must be shipped in trucks, by rail, flight, or by ship—all of which produce pollutants. Buying food that is sourced locally will help eliminate or reduce the environmental impact caused by transportation.
It also goes without saying that local products are more fresh. Hence, they are higher in nutrient value. Store your leftovers and use them up at one of your meals over the next few days. If you do have an overrun of food, such as after a party, share it with friends or neighbors. Walk or ride a bicycle when your destination is close to home. Surprisingly, short trips are generally the harder on your car and on the environment than long trips. Next time you only have a short distance to go, swap out your car for your feet or bike.
Encourage schools to install bicycle racks so that more children can ride bicycles to school. Always wear a helmet and safety reflective gear when riding a bicycle. Organize a carpool to commute for work or school to save gas. Coordinate with another person or 2 that you work or go to school with to set up a carpool. This can help the environment by saving on gas as well as maintenance on vehicles.
Work with other parents in your neighborhood to form a carpool to take the kids to school or extra-curricular activities.
environment - Saving the planet by reducing the population - Worldbuilding Stack Exchange
If you live near your children's school, consider organizing a "walking school bus" instead of driving. Children walk or bicycle to school together in groups, supervised and guided by parents. Neighborhood parents can take turns leading the group. Take mass public transit for an affordable, low-impact option. If you live in an area that has a bus, light rail, or subway system, consider taking this option to get to work, school or wherever you may need to go. Replacing car trips with mass transit trips reduces congestion on roads and reduces the overall amount of gasoline that is used.
Plan out your errands and combine trips to reduce pollution. Make errand trips more efficient by planning out where you will go and hitting all of your stops in one trip. When you can, simplify your purchases by checking their availability online or by phone before you make a trip. For example, you might use a grocery app to select the foods you need so you know they'll be available when you get to the store.
Not only will this save you time on grocery shopping, it'll also save you a trip to a different store!
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Drive an electric car if you have been looking for a new vehicle. Or consider a hybrid car, which runs on both gasoline and electric motors. These types of vehicles not only give off less emissions into the air, but they also can save you money with fewer trips to the gas station. Take fewer airplane flights. Whether for work or vacation, lower the number of flights you take each year. Airplanes emit vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other polluting materials, which increases annually due to increased numbers of flights around the world.
Trains or buses are good alternatives to short flights. Contact your government officials to ask for their support. Call or email your congressional representatives and local officials. Ask them to support environmental conservation and renewable energy, and to create and support policies that hold companies accountable. Donate to an environmental cause if you have extra money to give. There are hundreds of organizations that are dedicated to working on environmental issues. Find one whose mission and vision you support and donate money to help them achieve their goals. Join an environmental organization if you want to be involved.
Choose an organization that works to save and protect the environment. You can join an organization with a general focus on the environment, or one that supports a specific area. Volunteer your time to help promote a better environment. You can help by picking up litter, fixing bikes, planting trees and gardens, cleaning up rivers, and educating others.
Find an activity that suits your interests and set aside some time to go and help out. As an individual, there are lots of things you can do, starting with not littering or polluting. Dispose of everything properly, and even better, reduce your waste so that there is less to return to the landfill.
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Compost your food scraps and other compostables, to return nutrients to the soils. Lobby to have cleaner waters and air in your part of the world and make submissions whenever new projects are proposed that might cause more destruction of nature. Think before assuming that all human activities are either necessary or have to be done as they currently are -- think about a cleaner future and what it would take to get us there.
That is a positive thing to do, not a scary thing at all. Not Helpful 24 Helpful You are part of the environment and your very well-being depends on the healthiness and well-being of the environment around you. Your food, your air, your water and your sense of overall well-being is all sourced from nature. Since the era of industrialisation, human beings have assumed that the planet is something to tame and control, to be outside of and apart from. As a result, many practices from factories and chemicals on the farm, to cars and mass manufacturing have left scars on the environment that we now have an obligation to heal and restore.
Not Helpful 32 Helpful There are lots of advantages to helping save the environment! Doing your part to help means that you are working to ensure there are enough high-quality resources for yourself and future generations. And typically when you are doing things to save the environment like using less water, for instance you are also saving money--which can be a huge advantage for many people! Not Helpful 0 Helpful 7. That is a big question with no single, easy answer! On the one hand, it's about restoring or encouraging natural processes so that the ecosystems function healthily but without assuming we can control those processes -- rather, we need to learn to live with them.
It's also about restoring habitats, so that animal and plant species can survive in a healthy way. On the other hand, the phrase actually implies "save human beings" because if we don't respond effectively to such as issues as climate change, degraded ecosystems and other environment challenges, the survival of the human species is at risk. The definition really depends on which angle you're coming at it from but it might help to realize that if we muck things up so much that we cannot survive, the equilibrium will be restored without us. It is important to care for you environment because the future could look bleak, like in Dr.
Seuss' story, "The Lorax. Not Helpful 20 Helpful Animal agriculture produces lots of pollution, as do vehicle emissions. Not Helpful 25 Helpful It would be awesome if everyone could, but no. That's your personal decision. Not Helpful 29 Helpful Why is recycled paper more expensive if I am helping the environment? The recycling process is more expensive than the process of making new paper. Helping the environment is often more effortful and expensive than not bothering, which is why many people and companies don't bother. You will often find that environmentally friendly products costs a little more.
It's up to you to decide whether that's worth investing in. Not Helpful 23 Helpful A country could possibly put a higher tax on things that are harmful to the environment, such as meat, dairy, plastic bags, etc. The top reason why trees are cut down in the rainforest is for grazing land for cattle. That cattle is then later killed to be sold. You can save trees by not eating meat or dairy, or you can use products that contain recycled paper. Not Helpful 22 Helpful How can I help children who are dying from pollution?
Answer this question Flag as What are some fun ways to encourage everyone to upcycle. Kids, elders, parents, all alike. Suggest way in which individual organization and government can help to make the earth better place to live? How much of our energy comes from renewable sources?
Prince Harry and 'Pa' Prince Charles team up to save planet in surprise joint-appearance
How is electricity being used when a fully charged electronic is still plugged in? Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered. Already answered Not a question Bad question Other. By using this service, some information may be shared with YouTube. Article Summary X You can help save the environment by turning off things that use electricity when you're not using them and unplugging devices when they're not in use.
Did this summary help you? Article Info Featured Article Categories: Featured Articles Ecology and Conservation In other languages: Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 2,, times. Cookies make wikiHow better. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Sangeeta Sahu Jun 5, You can do your part just by changing your daily habits. To help save the environment, try decreasing energy and water consumption, changing your eating and transportation habits to conserve natural resources, and adapting your home and yard to be more environmentally-friendly.
MS Mari San Nov But wikiHow helped me to succeed, thanks! TJ Tass Jale Aug I have to start conserving the limited resources for my future children. AB Aleena Biju Jun 6, At first I was getting very obvious methods to conserve environment. Then I stumbled on this article. And seriously, these are very different views on conservation! I love them and they were very useful for my assignment.
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DB Dannetta Brewer Mar Remember, it's not about saving the planet, it's about saving ourselves. HVAC is one way to cancel temperatures rising, right? In fact this is already happening. The number of people who can enjoy a contemporary western standard of living sustainably, or with a minimal impact environmentally, is going to be pretty small. Before industrialisation the world's population was almost always under million.
That was largely because of both a lack of food and medicine. You need to consider that the problem now isn't the size of the population per se, but rather the minority who are using the majority of the world's energy - I'm talking about you, dear internet user! Either you strictly keep economic development to an absolute minimum, and can have more people, or you have a good standard or living and have far fewer people.
Fortunately there's already plenty of analysis written on these issues.
I however would err on the side of the most pessimistic figures. Unless we can develop cheap and plentiful energy like fusion or something then that's always going to be a problem because right now development and consumption is not sustainable.
So your figure is probably going to be less than two billion people. A UN report summarised 65 different estimated maximum sustainable population sizes. The most common estimate was eight billion, a little larger than the current population. But the estimates ranged from as few as two billion to, in one study, a staggering 1, billion. Of course that's the optimistic view, for the pessimistic you may also want to investigate "ecofascism".
Pentti Linkola's ideas are pretty much as extreme as they come. He advocates the mass murder of most of humanity, firstly by using WMD upon cities, and then enforcing strict controls over the economy and population growth via an ecological dictatorship. And stuff like migrating people from the developed world to the less developed world, and vice versa, to thin the population averages. Basically he's a green Pol Pot. His motivation being the idea that capitalism and industrialisation cannot be separated from the destructive effect they have on the planet. Therefore radical action is required to deindustrialise humanity.
This will reduce the maximum human population to at best half a billion, but if you want to encourage reforesting to encourage biodiversity it's going to be much lower still to reduce the demand for farmland. Given this context, in answer to your question. Firstly, you'd need to enforce serious quotas on land and resources like fishing to preserve them.
Which would help biodiversity return as pollution and exploitation is reduced. You'd also need to go with technologies which reduce strain on resources; like having lab grown burgers, or simply having people develop a taste for fried crickets rather than steak. As in terms of energy efficiency, the land and energy required to raise cows and chickens and such required for slaughter is non-trivial; like you mention vegetarianism for social reasons.
Secondly, you'd very much need an iron fisted political regime to enforce both technological advancement green technologies, lab burgers, fusion, etc and also to reduce population growth and energy use. This will also probably require social changes, like aforementioned change in taste of food, and also for people to become more energy efficient in how they live You might have to enforce changes like banning home and land ownership.
You'll definitely need to throw everything you've got at reducing the population. Possibly yes, encouraging euthanasia at a certain age, which reminds me of an episode of Star Trek TNG where they came across a society where almost everyone chose to die come age Bottom line, you'll have to do radical changes one way or another in almost every aspect of society as we know it. If you try to do this slowly, over many generations, priorities will change and the original policies will become less strict or will be dropped.
If you try to do it quickly, over a few decades, you will have to take measures that are at best highly dubious from an ethical standpoint. Depending on how and over what time line the population reduction was achieved, standards for quality if life could rise or fall. Here are a few scenarios. Let's assume everybody in the world now has an American standard of living probably the most resource intensive in the world.
Even with a severely reduced population this would be difficult for the earth to support long term, and the environmental outlook would end up quite similar. Maybe you'll get a few more decades out of the situation, maybe a few less. The current western lifestyle is not at all environmentally friendly, and the few measures you mention would be as effective as emptying a reservoir with a coffee mug.
Maybe if you dropped the population to a few million or so it would be more sustainable. Due to quickly reducing the population, you have problems. You have buildings and even cities with no one to occupy them, your policies to reduce the population had unintended negative consequences, and now crime is high and employment is low. With all the poverty, though, you are doing much less damage to the environment. Lots of abandoned neighborhoods are being reclaimed by wilderness and with the major industries gone, overall pollution has plummeted.
Of course, no one cares because they are more concerned about not being robbed or killed during the riots.
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Your powerful political rhetoric caused everyone to suddenly agree on what approach would best solve all the world's problems, and your solution works! Real beef tenderloin has nothing on vat grown beef flavored yeast! Due to the extreme economic investment, nearly all the major pollution problems have been solved, and the earth can now support a population of 10 billion without strain.
Hey look, Honey, we can start having kids again! A hundred years or so later the same overpopulation problem rises again. You set up a long term enforcement method to make sure your ancestors cannot expand the population or use more resources than the hard limit you set. Let's say it's a computerized overlord who ensures all women are sterilized after child number two, that shuts down or destroys any facility breaking the pollution laws, and does the same to any groups breaking the nature preservation laws.
In this case, you have centuries of environmentally friendly living ahead of you, until something happens that either destroys your enforcement mechanism, or something happens that your enforcement can't handle. At that point, after a few years or decades of chaos, humanity will go right back to using available resources in an unsustainable manner. Footprint is heavily affected by the people's lifestyles.
If everyone lived pre-fire tribally, cows would be a bigger cause of environmental shift. If it was all from Africa, the world would barely notice. Birth control methods could also work. Paying money to opt into sterilization? Honestly though, people like to breed, so it's a hard thing to do. Honestly, the easiest route is probably building space elevators to make travel to space dirt cheap and just getting people to move off-world.
An orbital ring could support a much higher population than Earth for a fraction of the resources and resources that don't necessarily have to come from Earth. The government forces you to have less than 2 child per family 1 or 0. The one child policy was effectively implemented in China. It s a controversial policy but the goal of curbing the population was reached so in that sense you could say it s a success.
You could also sterelize people based on some criteria. In developped countries, for certain categories of people, having children can competely ruin your lifestyle think party animal or carrer focused person. If society is build in a way that makes having children uninteresting, then people will naturally choose not to have children. You can see that happening in Western civilization, especially in big cities.
And of course, the solution everyone wants to avoid: Well, I'd say that trying to impose such policies would indeed be a good step towards reducing world population really quickly. Unless one has a totalitarian gov like People's Republic of China , such policies are straight way to a revolution. Thus within a few years of implementing such policy the population would be reduced because:. The ecological impact is based on exact technologies used in the conflict. Firearms are the most ecological choice. Nuclear warheads leave serious fallout plus there is controversy about risk of nuclear winter.
It is unclear with WMD, because some of them degrade quite easily after a few days of exposure to UV. Anyway, at least such war would cause ideological backslash, the world would return to long term trends of decreasing fertility rate, which already in big part of developed world put it below replacement level.
If people will not find a good way to solve overpopulation problem, planet will do that for them. Scientists now say that we need to lower CO2 in the atmosphere to ppm. We are over On this trajectory, glaciers will melt, increasing sea level by almost m ft. Which will drown big part of agricultural lands, severely decreasing population which can survive. Deserts in Africa expand. Food productivity of oceans decrease hotter water holds less oxygen, and more acidic water dissolves shells of smallest sea creatures, which form base of food chain.
If you think that forcing single child policy is hard, just wait until Netherlands will sunk under waves of the rising oceans and hundreds of millions inhabitants of Africa will flee the drought to Europe. What use will have oligarchs running fully automated factories for these hordes of unskilled labor? How high will taxes of working population will have to rise to support hundreds of millions of ecological refugees?
BTW, planet will be just fine. It will take about 20KY to more acid rains to bind the extra atmospheric CO2 back to minerals I asked a geologist , which will lower greenhouse effect and allow glaciers to start forming, lowering the oceans. But those 20K years might be rough on survivors. By clicking "Post Your Answer", you acknowledge that you have read our updated terms of service , privacy policy and cookie policy , and that your continued use of the website is subject to these policies.