Green Gal

What an incredible year 2015 has been! There have been so many new adventures in my life, such as moving to a new city and having fun living with Green Guy, gardening and eating vegetables I've grown myself, learning new recipes in the kitchen, meeting awesome new people in my community who advocate for better bicycling opportunities, and so much more. To celebrate and reflect on the last twelve months, here are (more than) twelve photos from 2015: On January, Green Guy and I hiked to the top of Buzzard's Roost in Big Basin State Park.     In January, we also went on the Light Up the Night Bike Party ride in Santa Cruz. In February, I tabled for the Sierra Club at an event at UC Santa Cruz. Throughout 2014 and 2015, I did a lot of tabling for the Santa Cruz Group and worked with many awesome interns who helped support the Sierra Club mission to explore, enjoy, and protect our planet.    In February on Valentine's Day, my sister and I participat...

Since Saturday, my family and I have been enjoying the fresh mountain air of the Sierra Nevadas of eastern California. Despite wanting to just leave behind all of our cares, we've been conscious of our environmental impact and have been thinking green (hard not to, when you're surrounded by beautiful green pine trees and pure, blue skies). Thought I'd share a few of the easy things we've done and are trying to do to make our vacation a little greener: 1. Traveling close to home. Any vacation is going to have its mileage footprint, but try thinking about places closer to home that you can visit and still feel like you're escaping. My family has been coming to the mountains for years, and while we could probably find a place a little closer to home for vacation, the drive to our favorite mountain town is only about 2.5 hours and we never have to think about carbon offsetting due to plane rides. Not to mention that going someplace closer to home costs less in gas an...

As I have mentioned here before, my best friend Alexysjayd is Native American. Though she is Cherokee and Choctaw, her family moved to the Sonora area and her grandmother and family live with the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians (if you visit the website, be sure to turn the sound on!). The Tuolumne Me-Wuk are known for their annual Acorn Festival in September, which I hope to attend this year. I plan on studying anthropology, Native Americans, and ethnobotany (also a some wildlife education would be cool) in college next year--likely at UC Santa Cruz--so I am very much looking forward to next week when Alexys brings me up to her grandmother's house to spend time at the reservation, learning about the Me-Wuk people and spending time in Sonora, possibly horseback riding, hiking and exploring. I've been going to Pinecrest since I was a baby, and Sonora is a town nearby that I love exploring. It can't be mere coincidence that Alexys and I became best friends within a week of ...

In Human Geography this year, we talked about ethnicity and how ethnicity is something we identify for ourselves. I had never really thought about my ethnicity, other than being white and American, so I started thinking about my heritage and which aspect of it I identify most with. I'm Norweigan, German, French, and, ah yes, Irish. I don't really celebrate anything German, Norweigan or French, but I definitely do celebrate my Irish heritage. So I decided that I consider myself American and Irish, if anyone were to ask me. I love St. Patrick's Day, especially the traditions my family has in celebrating it. Today I decked out in my green shorts, t-shirt and shamrock earrings and told everyone I could that I'm Irish. I wish my last name was Irish, like my friends with last names like O'Leary and McGuinness. I told them that my grandparents are Daleys, which is definitely Irish. Anyway, every St. Patty's Day, my family has dinner at my grandparents house, the side f...

Happy Valentine's Day! May you enjoy a simple, resourceful and non-wasteful day of celebrating love and apprectiation for others. Pesticide-free flowers, organic free trade chocolate, soy candles and organic dinner? I would hope! We're going to my grandparent's house this evening to celebrate with them and my aunt and uncle. Not sure that every one of those ingredients will be involved in our Valentine's Day celebrations tonight, but at least my sister and I made recycled Valentine's Day cards with old magazines, tattered books and scratch paper :-) On an entirely different note, I've been thinking lately about the greenwashing that's made its way into our minds to think that using the computer is a green alternative to using paper. In some ways, it can be. For large corporations and companies who use up so much paper in documents and reports, using the computer for emails and virtual files rather than printing everything is "greener" than using an...

This Valentine's Day, show your love for the Earth while showing your love for friends and family: create a Valentine's Day card of recycled or reused materials or make your own to avoid purchasing a wasteful card from the store. Whenever we purchase something that can otherwise be hand-made, we tell corporations that we support what they're doing and we increase demand for those products, when we otherwise could be decreasing our reliance on the corporate world. It increases the amount of trees cut down to make cards, the amount of plastic used to laminate those cards, quantities of ink used, transportation and fuel usage, and many other things that can be damaging to the environment in such a large-scale operation. Don't you wonder how many cards go unused and unpurchased every year? There are so many cards being produced for Hallmark, Walgreens, Walmart, Target--there's no way they're all used. Most of them are not recyclable. Nice Hallmark cards can show som...

To those of you who celebrate, Merry Christmas!! I'll be back next week with a post including my extinction research paper. See you then! -Green Gal

The Winter Solstice is here! The shortest day of the year is today, so from tomorrow until the Summer Solstice in June, days will lengthen. Some consider the Winter Solstice a rebirth, a celebration of mid-winter. Interestingly, Christians celebrate Christmas around the same time as the Winter Solstice, taking folk traditions and Pagan celebrations of Yule and other ancient rituals and combining them with the story of the birth of Christ to create a holiday that coincides with other festivities, perhaps to encourage more people to accept Christianity or to make Pagan celebrations more acceptable. The Pagans and other folk cultures celebrate the birth of the Sun . The Christians celebrate the birth of the Son . Christmas songs of today often find their roots in older folk traditions. German songs like "O Christmas Tree" (originally "O Tannenbaum" ), "Silent Night" ("Stille Nacht"), and "Ode to Joy" ("An die Freude") have b...

My college applications are all in. Transcripts have been requested. Essays are tucked away in files that I will not look at until next April when I won't stress if I left out a comma. The college application process is sure a journey, but I know the destination will be worth it. I have at least three weeks until I find out from anyone--but most likely it will be months before I hear back. I have to file my FAFSA, and then I just wait by the door for that letter. And now, for a list of where I applied... UC Irvine San Francisco State University Sonoma State University Rocky Mountain College University of San Francisco My major of choice for most is anthropology, but for some schools that don't have anthropology or have a stronger environmental studies program, I applied to major in environmental studies. Prescott is one of those places where the environment is already part of the school's philosophy, and if I went there, I would want to study to become a naturalist because ...