Hello!

I just want to start off by saying, I hope you all had a good Christmas and ate lots of yummy things. I certainly fulfilled that criteria.

Now I shall come to my more serious (ish) bit. You know that thing that happens just before you’re about to go to sleep where you think of 10 thousand brilliant things you need to do or write and you think, Yes, I shall do that in the morning, and then you wake up the next morning and do nothing. Well, this happens to me a lot…. Lately, I have been thinking that I should try and actively try and encourage people to save the planet. It is a super important thing we need to do. Just before I start, I would like to say, I am not perfect at all, I still pollute my fair share but I would like this to change and if we wait till someone is perfect, there probably wont be much planet left to mend.

We are killing the Earth. In my opinion, lots of people and businesses don’t think about the impact they are going to have before they do something.  We don’t respect the land or the animals that live on it. According to the National Geographic website, swathes of forest and rainforest the size of Panama are lost to deforestation each year! We need to start looking after our planet URGENTLY. We are melting the polar ice caps and killing hundreds of animals because we have taken away their homes.

We need to start treating animals better as well as our planet. Organic meat is great and if you buy it, it has to have met this criteria (taken from the Soil Association website).

Organic farm animals:

• Must have access to fields (when weather and ground conditions permit) and are truly free range
• Must have plenty of space – which helps to reduce stress and disease
• Must be fed a diet that is as natural as possible and free from genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
• Must only be given drugs to treat an illness – the routine use of antibioticsis prohibited
• Cannot be given hormones which make them grow more quickly or make them more productive
• Must not be produced from cloned animals

I don’t think you should be able to buy any other meat that isn’t organic because all animals deserve to be treated like this or better. Battery farming chickens only became illegal a few years ago in the UK, but I think it should have been outlawed a long time before that because the way battery farmed chickens were treated was despicable! They were fed drugs to make them fatter, quicker and they were kept in barns and never let out. The chickens were crammed in so closely, they hardly had room to move their wings. Our friends bought some live chickens from a battery farm, to rescue them and their chickens had half their feathers missing because they were treated so badly. This should never ever be the case! Just because humans are more advanced, in some ways, than other species, that does not give us the right to treat animals horribly. Animals don’t have police to stick up for them or to arrest the humans that tortured them.

We are melting our planet with global warming and ripping enormous holes in the Ozone layer. The Ozone layer is a thin  layer of Earth’s atmosphere that protects us from ultra violet rays from the sun. If we don’t change and become more eco-friendly, then we will kill the planet and everything on it. The Earth’s not going to end because the Mayans stopped their calendar, but it will end if we don’t pull our act together… We don’t have the excuse of ignorance because we know exactly what’s happening to the Earth so it’s time to do something NOW!!! We are emitting too much Carbon Dioxide (CO2) into the air and this is causing the earth to heat up – plants and trees taken in CO2 and emit oxygen but we are ripping them down and building ugly housing estates that will stay half empty.

We can help save our planet and our wildlife by:

• Buying organic or free range produce
• Buying food that’s grown in Britain (or where ever you live). This will mean that airplanes aren’t polluting our air as much.
• Grow more plants.
• Fight for the trees
• Turn off your lights when you don’t need them (something I need to work on).
• Switch off appliances at the socket when you aren’t using them. Just because appliances say, Standing By, they are still using electricity.
• Swap your ordinary light bulbs for energy saving light bulbs. You can find them almost everywhere.
• Recycle and Upcycle. Upcycling is like recycling but you can do it yourself. For example, I turned a t-shirt that was too small for me, into a scarf.
• If you have space, think about getting chickens or other livestock. It’s economical and eco-friendly!
• Campaigning to save the forests
• Donating money to organizations such as WWF and The Prince’s Rainforest Trust.
• Write to businesses and MP’s about things you think need changing
• Write naggy blog posts like this one
• Walk or bike short journeys instead of using the car
• Wear fake fur not real fur
• Tell others what is happening and how to prevent it
• If you have a baby, use terry-cloth nappies instead of disposable ones and buy organic baby food
• Get milk in glass bottles instead of plastic ones
• Encourage people to buy old houses and do them up instead of moving into newly built ones. We have plenty of houses just sitting there so we don’t need to rip up big patches of land to build new houses.

These are just a small percentage of simple things you can do to start off the process of rescuing the planet. I am sorry this is so long and a bit shouty but I feel this is an important topic and we should do something about it. It needs discussing. I hope I have made an impression. Thank you for reading.

Owl xx