“…Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” - Steve Jobs
How do you make the world a better place without ever leaving your computer? Here are 7 things you can try:
1. Plant a Tree in Africa
Tree-Nation is an ecological project with a focused objective: To plant 8 million trees in the Sahara to fight desertification! Large-scale plantation of trees will increase the land’s productivity and re-generate the soil.
It is basically an online community in which you can buy your own tree and become it’s guardian. To top it off, it even comes with photo and blogging facilities, and a GPS tracker (!!!). Even if you don’t make use of all the fancy bells and whistles, helping plant a tree in a vital area of Africa will leave you with a fuzzy feeling in your heart.
2. Simplify Carpooling
Want to get a carpool or want more buddies for a road trip? Use GoLoco to share rides for free, or share trip costs quickly and easily online before the trip without the awkward money discussion or exchange in the car. Here’s how it works:
- Post a trip — want to go to the beach? shopping? daily commute? out of town? — for your friends, colleagues, or classmates to see (Integrates with Facebook)
- View profiles of people whose trips match your own. Decide if you’d like to travel with them.
- Accept a trip as is, or negotiate changes online.
- Meet up at a specific location and time.
Use GoLoco to make carpooling a whole lot easier, and do your part to reduce CO2 emissions and lessen traffic congestion.
3. Get Answers to Environmental Questions
Yahoo! Answers is an online community where you can ask questions on a range of topics, from the serious to the purely fun, and get answers from real people - Or you might help others by answering their burning questions instead.
One thing I like about it is that it offers is a dedicated section to the environment. Here you can discuss anything from alternative fuel vehicles to green living to conservation.
4. Spread a Good Cause Easily on Your Blog
There’s nothing many bloggers love more than a cool looking badge on their site. Most do fun little things like tell the time, display where site visitors come from, etc.
Carebadges is a site where you can get badges to put on your blog that help a specific cause. Pick any cause you’d like to help - from Unicef, to the red cross, to global warming… or even start your own cause if you want to.
5. Save the World One Click at a Time
It’s simple. When you click on a give button you will be shown some advertisements. Ripple passes the revenue from these advertisements onto your chosen charity. It ranges from 1c to 20c. It doesn’t sound like much but it adds up quickly! To give you an idea of the difference you can make, one SINGLE click:
- Gives 6 days access to clean water
- Gives 2 days access to education
- Finances a USD$100 loan for a day
6. Watch Grassroots Videos on Environmental Conservation
It’s like YouTube, but for tree huggers. Environmental Countdown is a free online video streaming service that allows users to view, share and upload videos about the environment and public health. Although limited in number of videos right now, it is a good resource to learn about what others are doing in their own communities to help out the environment.
7. Recycle Your Electronic Waste
“Electronic waste represents 2 percent of America’s trash in landfills, but it equals 70 percent of overall toxic waste” - Wikipedia
Throw out an obsolete computer, CD or old phone in your dumpster, and you add to the statistics. Many recycling centers are not equipped to handle electronics wastage - so what do you do then? Try out GreenDisk, a service dedicated to helping the recycling and proper disposal of techno-trash.
There you have it - 7 things you can try out today, and make that difference right away.
Why? Because good planets are hard to find.
Do you actively participate in environmentalism? Tell us in the comments!
Note: This is part 4 of an ongoing series of posts based on technology and the environment. If you liked this post, you would enjoy the following posts as well: Part 1, Part 2, Part3
[tags] environment, green, trees, charity [/tags]
September 8th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
goloco makes me remember about agloco. :D