ATTEMPTS TO SAVE PLANET BY NAMELESS DOT IN SUBURBIA BEGINS!

Action stations indeed. Time to pull a finger out. In fact include all digets and borrow the neighbours as well.
Before i saw 'An Inconvenient truth' I was about to advertise for four other families to join us in attempting to pay off our respective mortgages in five years, no matter how laughable the likelihood. Trust me, you'd have tears streaming if you knew what we still owe. Anyway the idea was to chuck all monies onto said mortgage but share support and idea with some others along the way. When I rang the local rag and explained what I wanted to advertise they agreed it was a fabulous idea but were not sure where in the newspaper it needed to go and so decided to call me back when they had worked it out. Now maybe they just never called back because they thought I was a fruitloop but I tended to wonder if it wasn't the right time to begin it. And in any case i was about to go see the above mentioned movie and wondered if my priorities my change after seeing it.
Well, of course they did rather and I discussed with my children the next day my new plans of attack. My eldest son, who so effortlessly notices the flaws in all my plans mentioned that it would really be better to go ahead and try and pay the mortgage off sooner as we could do far more for the planet if we were debt free and happy. In the end we decided to do both.
If we do many of the things in our home and with food and transport that are planet friendly, they will also help us save money althought possibly not all initially.

WHAT HAVE WE GOT SO FAR?
We have a 4000l water tank, but only for the garden so far.
We have a solar hot water system
We have two compost bins
We are growing a few veges and fruit, permaculture style
We have a water and energy efficient washing machine and dishwasher
About 30% of our groceries are organic
We joined the local Greens to help local environment and keep up to date with whats happening nationally
I Volunteer with Bushcare, a local environment group which weeds and replants
We support three environmental charities we believe in
I support the local schools environmental programs

Its not a bad start. We live within walking distance to a train station which my husband catches to work each day. Ok, he hates the job, but at least he isn't driving there. The school is also walking distance. We could walk more often, this walks the dogs at the same time.
We have a 1998 Subaru Forrester. It's a great car and I fill up the tank about every 2-3 weeks. We would love a Hybrid car, but the cost is a bit out of our budget! Our home is smallish and is clad. Ceiling insulation only. Would like to do walls but cladding is asbestos so taking it off is a problem in itself. We do have reverse cycle air-con and plan to replace this with excellent insulation, an evaporative cooler fan and maybe a combustion stove. Then again with the planet heating up, maybe we'll skip the stove! We use grey water on our small back lawn and thats the only water it gets. We compost most of our raw food scraps but we could compost more paper out of the recycling. We have water saving fixtures on the shower but we could time showers. We need to put up afew awnings to the north to keep the heat outside. We could put in another few water tanks and use tank water for everything. We would like solar panels and get off the grid but it's a bit pricey right now. In the meantime we'll use Green Electricity. As for food, we do eat meat and could eat less animal food altogether. When you do an eco footprint questionaire to see how big an impact on the planet you make, food makes a huge difference. We used to get home delivered organic groceries but they tries pyramid selling on us and in offence, we dropped them like a hotcake. I't's not easy to get organic groceries round here. The big supermarkets carry a reasonable amount of drystuffs and a small and polyurethaned amount of fruit and vege. We'd like to support a farmers market but it needs to be organic. Not easy where we live. Half an hour away is a good food co-op I'd like to join but it would have to be a once a month visit to be practicle. Anyway, I've begun with a few reminder notes around the house. we are going to do an electricity audit around the place to see whats guzzling our power the most, ring the elecricity co to change to green electicity, get some watertank prices and check out eveporative coolers. Oh, and plant the tomatoes, capsicum, mini-melons and climbing cucumber.