Happy Earth Day!

[BailOut]

Happy Earth Day everyone! Another year has gone by and some measurable "green" progress has been made as a nation. It is my hope that each of you will attend some form of celebration and learn a little about the world we live in and our affect on it, and make a personal commitment to adopt at least one "green" strategy for the coming year.

In my part of the world this is a busy time. Last Sunday the city of Reno, Nevada and the nonprofit Nevada Econet group held their celebration at Idlewild Park and it was wildly successful. Thousands of people from all walks of life attended and enjoyed healthy food, great music, fun and educational booths, and some made purchases to aid in their green efforts such as one of the recycled bicycles that I helped repair and transport to the event via the Kiwanis Club for sale at cheap, accessible prices (as alway, as we are a nonprofit that only uses the funds for our kids programs such as free bicycles for low income children). Our bicycle sale/swap was so successful that we had to bring more bicycles over at lunch time as we sold out in the morning.

This afternoon will be my environmental highlight of the year, the Kids for Conservation Festival in Incline Village, Nevada. This will be my 3rd year participating and I have entered 2 booths this time. I will staff the "Energy Bike" booth where kids can pedal a stationary bicycle to power up a CFL bulb and then an incandescent bulb, allowing them to feel how much more power it takes for the incandescent (60W vs. 14W for a CFL). An Americorps volunteer will staff my other booth which uses a pair of Kill-A-Watt meters to show the wattage usage of CFL and incandescent bulbs in real-time, and has photographs of different kinds of bulbs that the children can make a game out of by trying to spot which are CFL and which are incandescent. Last year we had about 130 kids attend an this year we are expecting over 175.

I was also interviewed by the daughter of an associate of mine for a conservation-centric Earth Day article in her school newspaper in a city in Illinois. It should be published today and I certainly look forward to reading it.

Please let us all know what you did/are doing for Earth Day, and have fun with it!