Help Your Parents Save the Planet: 50 Simple Ways to Go Green Now!, Text by Gregory Rutty, published by PlayBac. Hey kids, School’s out! You have all this extra time now. What to do with your summer vacation? Save the Planet! Help your parents save the planet now. No Superpowers Required!
About the Book
“Here is your first guide to going green, filled with practical ideas that are easy to do, don’t cost a thing, and are perfect for the entire family”. Colourfully illustrated and well laid out, this book is full of ways to reuse, reduce and recycle. With family or friends, for play and entertainment or just being environmentally friendly, this book covers all with ways that are simple, with common sense. It is easy to read and do”.
My Thoughts
I love getting the kids involved in saving this planet of ours. After all, they have to keep their room tidy, why not the world? Most young imaginations comes from creativity and the ability of taking one thing old and useless and turning it into something else more fun. Garbage day awareness is something that every kid should know about. Make it a challenge to see who can produce the less garbage in the house and have a reward like a fun picnic in the park or beach day. Help Your Parents Save the Planet: 50 Simple Ways to Go Green Now!, has some awesome tips and hints for us all. Go green in the kitchen begins by mentioning to us to make sure the dishwasher is full before running it, suggests we eat what we buy and don’t waste food and that empty containers and a few dried beans makes handy and fun maracas. The book goes on with fun and easy things for kids to do and remind their parents to do as well.
Book Highlight
There are no food recipes in this book, but the entire book is a recipe on how to save the Planet.
INTRODUCTION TO A GREEN LIFESTYLE
- Before you get started, try to remember a few simple things: First, don’t worry about doing everything all at once. Take it slowly; maybe try one new idea each day or each week. Going green is about changing the way we live, and it may take time to teach your parents everything you’ll learn here. The important thing is to keep trying!
- Second, going green means not always doing or buying everything you want, which may be difficult at first. Just remember that many small sacrifices and tiny changes can make a big impact on the earth – and the power to make these changes is in your hands!
- The last thing to remember is to have a good time! Sharing these ideas and tips with family and friends is part of the fun. Encouraging others to adopt a green lifestyle is rewarding for you and the environment.
You know better. You can make a difference. So what are you waiting for? Let’s go save the Planet!
Contest Rules
Kids, to Win your own copy of Help Your Parents Save the Planet: 50 Simple Ways to Go Green Now!, text by Gregory Rutty, simply leave a comment at the end of this blog, and as well answer this question. What are you already doing to help teach your parents how to save the planet?
Good Luck, Lady Locavore
Lady Locavore 
I’m fairly new to the “green scene” and I’ve got to say that I really love this book. The fifty tips offered are broken out into 11 different sections: Knowing Your Impact, Driving, Energy, Water, Real Estate, Shopping, Recycling, Family Values, Work, Investing and Giving back to green charities.
The author’s tips are really useful and he backs it all up with solid stats (some very surprising ones too that really drive his points home…)
It’s an easy read with each chapter summed up into specific actionable steps you can take…which for me is extremely helpful.
But the BEST part about Bach’s book is that he shows you how to SAVE and actually EARN money by going green. I found this to be a unique perspective since the common misconception is that going green is expensive.
I highly recommend Go Green, Live Rich!
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Hello Lady Locavore! I constantly nag my mom to recycle everything! And if an electronic device is being thrown away, I ask if I can keep it for parts(Instead of them going to a landfill)
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Jesse, Keep up the good work!
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I forgot to add my mom’s name. Her name is Michele Oxlade.
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In the past 50 years we have lived a wasteful lifestyle. We throw lots of stuff into the landfills and use a lot of energy and fossil fuels. There has been a movement in favor of using our resources in a more thrifty manner, with the color green applied to this movement because it is the color of vegetation. We hear of all kinds of ways we can save the environment.
Here is another one, with David Bach’s “Go Green, Live Rich”. He presents 50 different ways of living life in a more earth-friendly manner. Some examples include “Grow a Greener Lawn”, “Switch to Compact Fluorescent Bulb”, and “Upgrade to a Hybrid”. Further, he provides a way you can calculate your planetary footprint.
The biggest advantage of this book is the large number of references it gives. Everywhere you look there is a URL that you can access to find more about the subject. There is a list of references at the end of the book. Mr. Bach provides references for many of the statistics he provides us, so the book is well documented.
I think the book would be improved if it had a table of contents so you can go quickly to the area you want. Some of the statistics tend to be hyperbolic. For example, Americans use 800 million gallons of gasoline in lawn mowers. Don’t use huge illion numbers when a percentage gives a truer picture. In this case, 800 million gallons is around 19 million barrels of oil; since Americans use 8 billion barrels a year, this is 0.23% of the total. Although gasoline-powered mowers do use fossil fuels, they pale in insignificance compared to the usage in automobiles.
Like most green endeavors, this book does not go far enough. In the future we simply will not have all these resources to use. His emphasis is on driving cars, maintaining lawn and so forth with less fossil fuels, even though we may not be able to drive at all when impending oil shortages occur. He talks in terms of pollution and global warming, when the running out of fossil fuels is by far a worse problem. Further, he advocates driving hybrids, using solar panels, and using CFLs without considering the possibilities of shortages of lithium, nickel, tellurium, indium, and other resources this might cause and the possibility of mercury pollution from CFLs. He does mention “Grow your own food”, which some peak oil experts say will become necessary in the years ahead. But I think a slant towards living within our resource means and a warning about the impending fuel shortage would improve the book.
This is an elementary book. He does not go into the details of solar panels, for instance, as to whether you have southern exposure, the dimensions required and so forth, for example.
I still think this is a good book to get if you want to get started with living more within our planet’s means.
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Thank you Dr. James Blowers for such an insightful comment. I am flattered you visited my blog and were moved to leave me such an informative and interesting response.
Lady Locavore
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