Where's it at? (Summit! Summit!) That's a habitat.

 

     This episode of Sesame Street aired yesterday morning, the word on the street being, habitat. For my entire life, the Midwest, and the Ozarks have been my habitat. For the past year, Springfield has been my habitat, and for the past month or so, Summit has been my habitat.

Habits make a habitat

     Keeping up with certain habits is vital to maintaining a habitat. But with this "greener" Summit Park house, out goal is to not only maintain a habitat, but also maintain it in a sustainable way. An important part of living a greener lifestyle is to realize that picking up certain habits and dropping others can also effect other, more natural, habitats. 

     The rapping real-estate taught Big Bird about various habitats for birds such as the beach, the swamp, and the rainforest. While watching this episode, I thought, "Wow, not one of these bird habitats is completely safe from human manipulation or destruction." One of the goals with this Summit house was energy efficiency. I never knew all of the plans for this particular Summit house, but I know that some of them fell through. And so, our Summit group can't simply depend on an energy-efficient dishwasher or a  solar-powered television so that we can call ourselves "greener".
     We all have habits that are not all that energy efficient. These are habits that we've learned from our families, or our friends, or the people on TV. But it's important to become aware of wasteful habits. I'm as guilty as anyone else. But here's a few easy ones to change if you just take the time to think about it:

1. Turn off the lights when you leave the room.

     I remember when I was little, right before we were going to leave on vacation, I once turned on all of the lights in the basement to see if it would become blindingly white. Luckily, my parents checked to make sure all of them were off before we left.

P.S. My basement didn't become blindingly white.

2. Turn off the television when you leave the room. 

     Sometimes you're just going to the bathroom or grabbing something from the other room. Sometimes someone else just went into the other room and you thought they were coming back. But don't be lazy. If they've been gone for a while and you don't want to watch TV anymore, but you want to be polite just in case, ask them (they'll probably say no, they don't want to watch anymore TV) and then turn it off. 

3. Waiting for the sink water to get real hot so you can wash your hands real clean-like.

     This is one I'm recently/currently guilty of. Sometimes it takes a long time for the sink water to heat up, and that is a lot of wasted water. Well, maybe not a lot. But too much. Unless someone posts some sort of statistic saying how much healthier and cleaner I am going to be if I wash my hands only under hot water, I am going to start, sigh, washing my hands in cold water. 

And for a few that take a little more effort (but not much, so you should definitely do these, too):

4. Ride a bike!

     It's better exercise than driving, and the weather is wonderful right now. It's great if you ride it around Drury campus, but maybe next time you're going downtown or to do some minor grocery shopping at Price Cutter or Dillon's, why not ride your bike? If you don't have one, maybe you have a friend who doesn't ride his/hers much and would let you borrow one. And if that's not a possibility, walking or running is an option. True, it's not as time-efficient as biking or driving, but if you have some extra time on your hands and want to go somewhere relatively close, why not just walk instead? It's often even better exercise than biking!

5. Recycle (And Reduse, and Reuse, too, please)

    It can be a hassle, kind of, since all we have are those tiny black bins for all of our recycling. Our Summit house has been trying to come up with a regular schedule, and I think maybe now we've finally got one that works! For a Summit house, I would say it's good to do once a week, just so things don't get too out of control. We've just been using regular old containers and boxes to keep ours and then a couple people will gather it and take it over to the Drury recycling center on Central and Summit. They've got plastic recycling (with a few exceptions for things you can't recycle such as to-go containers), cardboard recycling, paper recycling, aluminum recycling, and glass recycling. 


Hopefully our group can start teaching the kids of Boyd Elementary all of these good habits, so they can learn them while they're young.

One last thing that is sooooooooo bad (and we've been noticing it just piles up). Styrofoam. Sometimes it's easier just to take the Commons to-go. Especially when they surprisingly have a lot of wonderful desserts that you don't want to eat all at once.
My suggestion: (which I have yet to implement but will begin to do so today) bring in your own tupperware container (swipe your card still). I'd like to see if there are better to-go options than styrofoam, but none of the options are too great.

-Desirée