Green Gal

Happy Earth Week! I was invited to speak at my high school, Amador Valley High School, in celebration of Earth Week today. It's been awhile since I visited the place where I spent four years of my life learning and exploring my identity as an environmentalist. I actually started this blog while attending Amador Valley High School! Below is the text of my speech that I used as a reference this afternoon. What I actually said varied slightly, but here's the gist: Hello, my name is Melissa Ott, and I graduated from Amador in 2010. I’d like to thank the organizers of Earth Week for inviting me to speak to you all today. Before I begin, I would like to a take a moment to acknowledge that we are standing on indigenous land and honor the Muwekma-Ohlone people who cared for this beautiful valley for generations before it was settled and renamed Pleasanton. The descendants of the Ohlone are still alive today, some of them in the Bay Area working to gain recognition and access to their...

Sure, sometimes you end up next to the smelly guy on the train or you wind up getting the bus with the loud cell phone people or the crazies. But the more you take public transportation, the more skilled you become at selecting seats, using body language (like angry faces and glaring to avoid conversations!), and just learning to deal with it because there are plenty of reasons--I'm about to name five--why public transportation is awesome. Here's why I love public transportation, and why I encourage you to utilize it as often as you can in your daily life. 1. Public transportation reduces the number of polluting, traffic-causing cars on the road. Every time you take public transportation when you might otherwise have taken a car takes one car off the road. Think about people who take PT every day to work, school, or wherever they going when they could have driven. Certainly a bus requires more fuel than a compact car, but if you fill a bus with people and take the cars...

Stores that sell college dorm "necessities" give out those lists every fall with tons of awesome gadgets, furniture, and other "essentials that every college student needs"! Of course, you want to be comfortable and have all the stuff you need for college so you can focus on getting good grades and having fun. But as a third year college student who thinks she might have finally gotten the system down, I'm here to tell you that while those lists can be great reminders for the things you really do need, you do not need to get those items new and you certainly don't need to buy all of the latest "dorm" accessories--if truth be told, you don't have room for all of those things in your dorm. One of my boxes Green Gal brought to her first dorm room at UC Santa Cruz. If you want to save money, reduce your environmental impact, and still have the stuff you need to be comfortable and happy as you study and enjoy college, you first have to take th...

This week, I took Beth Terry (of MyPlasticFreeLife.com )'s  Show Your Plastic Challenge . I met Beth last Sunday at a lecture she gave for Science Sundays at the Seymour Center at Long Marine lab, and I was inspired to be more conscious of plastic in my life and begin the process of living without it. You can read a little about Beth and the lecture that I attended  here . I purchased a copy of Beth's book at the lecture last Sunday, and I am LOVING it. She has not only great resources and facts about plastic, but she also includes practical solutions. I will be writing more about her book in future posts. The challenge is to " Collect all of your own plastic waste, both recyclable and non, for a minimum of one week ." I tried my best to do the challenge this past week, but I went home for the weekend (I spend most of the year on campus at UC Santa Cruz) and lost track of a few of the plastic items that I used while out to lunch with family. I also didn't pr...

If you've never laid in bed awake, unable to sleep, but smiling and laughing to yourself at how fantastic life is, then I highly recommend allowing yourself to do so next time you catch the life-is-awesome bug. If you're alone, talk to yourself about it. What is it that's so great about now? I know it sounds like something a crazy person would do, but believe me, it helps affirm the goodness of that moment and makes you realize so many things about yourself. At least that's what has happened to me the past two nights. And just now, as I was unable to sleep, thinking about how bright life is (especially when you get a lot of homework done in a short period of time), I realized that if I was a time-traveller, I would go back in time to 4th grade Green Gal and give her a hug, tell her that she is awesome for being who she is, and that she can do anything she wants. It's not that I wasn't told this myself as a child; I'm certain I was. But the present-day Gre...

I should really be reading Paradise Lost, but I figure if I spend 30 minutes writing this post right now, it will actually be written. The homework will get finished because it has to, but updating this blog is not mandatory. However, I really love the connections I've made through it and the interesting things I've learned from readers and from reading other bloggers, so I'm making it one of my priorities. That being said, some weeks, you may hear nothing from Green Gal, but I'll be back when school work slows down. Ok, now for the post! This week's Change the World Wednesday Challenge is to "conserve water by not wasting it. Consider every drop which typically gets poured down the drain and find creative uses for it. Examine your water use and see where, and how, you can make improvements." When I heard what the challenge was, I started thinking about ways that water is used that we don't always see or think about. Here are some thoughts I h...

This week's Change the World Wednesday Challenge on the Reduce Footprints blog was the following open-ended challenge: This week, suggest a challenge. This can be a repeat of a past challenge, a version of something we've already done or something completely new ... anything which you feel we should address. And/Or ... Tell us about something you're struggling with ... a green-living activity which is difficult to adopt in your life. On my blog post on Wednesday where I posed my challenge idea , I wrote: I am going to combine the two options this week and choose a challenge that will benefit my wallet as well as the planet. I struggle sometimes with remembering how must waste is generated by eating out. It often feels easier to just buy food for lunch instead of preparing it at home, and stopping by Starbucks often sounds delicious... But most fast food or to-go establishments generate waste--not to mention it costs more money than just eating the food alr...

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...