From Guest Blogger Leslie Kramer: Five Cool Ways Your Neighborhood Can Band Together To Become Greener

One person trying to become greener is great, but if they can persuade their entire neighborhood to do it we’ll all be able to make a much bigger difference.

Are you old enough to remember what neighborhoods used to be like decades ago? These days they’re completely different and this isn’t a good thing. They’re becoming a lot dirtier, but I’m not talking about the trash lying in the middle of the street. We’re wasting tons of energy and we’re polluting the environment at a frightening rate. Instead of trying to tackle our anti-green problems on your own I’m going to look at a few ways you can do it with the help of the lovely people who live in your neighborhood.

Grow your own foods

I guarantee you don’t eat the same thing for dinner every day, so if you wanted to grow your own vegetables you would need to grow a huge selection of them so you had a variety to choose from each day. You could change things if you band together with a few different people in your neighborhood because each person could grow a different selection of vegetables. When everything was ready for picking you could swap them around so each of you got a little of everything. Aeroponics is a cool way of going here, as well; it happens to be listed in this site’s list of cleantech investment opportunities.

Drive each other around

You can tell someone to take public transport a million times, but at the end of the day most people will ignore you. Carpooling is different because people still get to sit in the comfort of a car. If people in the same neighborhood are going to the same place it makes sense for them to share in the driving duties. Even if a few people would prefer to drive all the time everyone can help by throwing in gas money and this will ensure a lot more cars stay off the road.

Buy from local shops

Most people would prefer to buy from massive supermarkets because they save a tiny amount of money. This is actually bad for a number of different reasons. If all your local shops close down the entire world will be taken over from huge corporations and they’ll waste plenty of green land building their new premises. The other reason it’s silly to buy from supermarkets is because they waste an unbelievable amount of gas driving everything around from store to store.

Come together as one

We’ve heard about this a million times, but it can only happen when a whole community bands together. If someone wants to buy a piece of land to turn it into a giant factory you don’t need to let them get away with it without a fight. If everyone comes together to protest you might be able to do something about it. Unfortunately these days most people don’t care and they’d rather sit at home watching TV, but if enough people come together to protect the environment you can do almost anything.

Speak to people

If you go around you can educate some of your neighbors because they might not have any idea how they can turn their home green. Do they know it’s know possible to wash most of their clothes in cold water because of the detergent we have available? Do they know they can install a low-flow shower head to save lots of water with a quick bathroom design change? You don’t need to speak to people you don’t know, but I’m sure you could educate your friends and your neighborhood would become greener because of it.

It’s hard to make a dent

If you try to do everything on your own it’s going to be hard, but if lots of people band together we have a much better chance of tackling the problem. We’ll never make a real difference until the major corporations get on-board, but we need to start doing something now.

Leslie Kramer, the author of this post, is a freelance blogger, who is currently writing for Basement Bro, specializes in basement remodeling and repair. Leslie is an adventure sports lover and likes to go on trekking and camping with her friends on weekends.