Earth Day 2010

Earlier today, someone asked me what they could do to celebrate Earth Day. I responded, "Planting a tree or giving up factory farmed meat for a day (or forever) would be a good place to start."  Then I found this brilliantly begun message in my inbox and felt I had to pass it on....

Dear Jennifer,

You are destroying the ocean. We all are. We're polluting oceans with plastic waste and chemicals, we're overfishing, and we're causing climate change to warm and acidify our ocean waters.

But this Earth Day, you can do something about it. Since we are the problem, we can also be the solution. We can change our habits and protect our oceans forever.

We've partnered with our friends at Participant Media, the entertainment company behind such films as An Inconvenient Truth and Oceans, to help start a movement of people dedicated to taking simple steps to reduce three of the main threats to oceans: plastic waste, overfishing and climate change.

This Earth Day, you can make a difference by signing a public pledge to take at least one action to help save our oceans »

Here are the three most important steps you can take to help protect our oceans:

1. Choose reusable bottles and bags instead of plastic ones. Americans together use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and each use 500 plastic bags annually. These can take anywhere from 1,000 to 1 million years to degrade, and are why plastic constitutes 90% of all trash floating on the ocean's surface.

2. Eat non-endangered seafood. Due to our over-consumption of seafood, 90% of the world's large fish, such as tuna, swordfish, flounder and sharks have been killed in the past 50 years. If we continue at our current rates, all salt-water fish could be extinct by 2048.

3. Reduce your carbon footprint. Carbon intensive activities such as driving, flying, and inefficient home heating are warming ocean waters, which could be catastrophic for millions of ocean species unable to adapt to higher temperatures. The extinction of any number of these species could in turn cause a collapse of the marine food chain, affecting everything from plankton to polar bears.

We can change all this by together changing our own individual behavior. Together we can ensure healthy, clean oceans for future generations. It all starts with people like us deciding to make small changes that can have a big impact.

Sign the pledge today and commit to help save the world's oceans »

Thank you for taking a stand,

– The Change.org Team in partnership with Participant Media

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line:  There are many ways to celebrate Earth Day with good food.  If you need more ideas, check out last year's post Eating Green for Earth Day.