Ecological Tips – Page 2

Natural Insect Repellents

Imagine using a wonderful smelling bowl of lightly crushed leaves and flower petals as not only an attractive decoration, but as a chemical free homemade insect repellent. You can grow all of the ingredients in pots, or splurge with a little creativity, but the end result is a safe and effective way to keep the bugs away! Avoiding harsh and unpleasant odors from potentially harmful commercial products is a tremendous reason to try natural insect repellents, as if being inexpensive and beautiful weren’t already enough.

Roses, rosemary, and eucalyptus are natural insect repellents. In fact, you probably have garlic, bay leaves, and possibly cloves and cayenne pepper in your kitchen. These are all plants that offer protection from ants and flying insects, such as mosquitoes. Lemongrass is a natural source of citronella. For small or enclosed uses, these should be sufficient for a bug-free afternoon. But let’s also look at a couple of natural heavy-hitters in insect repellents, marigolds and mint. And keep in mind that most garden plants have preferred neighbors.

Gasoline That Grows on Trees – Literally

Well, not gasoline per say but something strangely close. With minimal filtering and no refining these amazing trees produce fuel for up to 70 years and and at a rate of 1 barrel per 4 trees per year. After extraction, the fuel must be used within a few months but can be put almost directly to work in a diesel engine. However, even if the fuel is left for too long it changes into another form of oil that fetches a fairly high market price as a medicinal substance.

10 Creative Ways to Recycle Ordinary Objects

Creatively artistic recycling doesn’t have to be limited to helping the environment: it can also be a challenge and opportunity to ingenious designers who work with materials most people would consider waste to create amazing things. Some of the following designs serve multiple purposes: illustrating the material possibilities of what most would consider trash while also maximizing the aesthetic potential of what would otherwise be considered waste objects. Clothes become rugs, airline trolleys become furniture, cardboard becomes bridges and sewage turns into building blocks!

How About a Paperless Home?

Except perhaps in the bathroom, do you really need any kind of paper? These days it seems like paper is just an intermediate step or default conclusion – a copy that will eventually be scanned in or a digitally written paper printed out at the end. Still, is paperless the solution to environmental problems or simply wasteful in another way?

The Unsustainable Church of Scientology

Many would say that the Church of Scientology is unsustainable in more ways than one, but few have stopped to consider how that applies to the natural environment. While Scientologists overtly organize to protect nature and profess to protect the planet many of their practices seem to contradict their statements. The overall effect seems to be alarmism couple with inaction: all of the theoretical zest of GreenPeace with all of the inaction of President Bush. Here are some of the ways in which Scientology seems to skew environmental issues and play on public opinion without a correspondingly set of proactive strategies. This side of Scientology seems to have been lost in the scandalous shuffle of recent news but Scientology’s mixed messages and actions on the environment are also important.

5 Strange Stop-Gap “Solutions” to Climate Problems

Wait so is it global warming, cooling or climate change? Good, bad or ugly? The questions, perspectives and believes about climate issues change almost as much as the proposed solutions or interventions. Some of these supposed answers to core climate questions are truly as bizarre as these weird alternative fuel sources and outlandish as this incredible man-made recycled island. Whatever your opinions on climate change these are, at the very least, entertaining and extremely odd.

Strange Environmental Facts from GreenExpander

As soon as you think you know it all you’re bound to find out something new. One of the biggest problems with understanding and debating environmental issues is that people often don’t have their facts straight when they go into a discussion. New facts and ways of understanding them can jar the complacent mind into reevaluating what they assume to be true, and these are no exceptions. Here are just a few interesting ones to start with.

3 Great Lists that Make Green Living Easier

100 Ways to Save the Environment: In your home, yard, office and everywhere else you can reduce energy consumption and use alternative methods to clean, weed and perform other daily activities to limit your carbon footprint and go green without a great deal of inconvenience or added effort.

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