The Earth Week Challenge

April 22 is Earth Day, but this year we’ve decided to commemorate this important day by celebrating the earth for an entire week. Each day leading up to Earth Day, we will post an earth-conscious challenge that if implemented could help make our lives and communities greener, cleaner, and brighter.

We often wonder whether a simple change can really make a big difference, and this is doubly true when we’re confronted with challenges as big as environmental integrity and climate change.

Join us this week as we challenge the doubt and take the risk to reimagine the way we live. What may seem at the start to be the effort of just one person can grow to become the effort of thousands, even millions. Because once one person finds the way, why couldn’t we all?

Let's challenge ourselves to celebrate the earth this week and create meaningful change--one day at a time. You can get your daily Earth Week Challenges live on our Facebook page, or check back here each day.

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Day 1: Become Aware

Our first challenge is to tap into the power of ideas and become aware.

Pick up that book you've been wanting to read, like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, or Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, and engage the voices who are immersed in the global environmental conversation.

Watch a film or a documentary, like No Impact Man, King Corn, or Chasing Ice, to gain compelling, visual insight into the environmental realities we face.

Read engaging web articles or essays to deepen your understanding of the issues.

Whether you're already informed about all the issues or you could afford a bit more environmental know-how, we invite you to take a look through these resources and spend some time among the ideas this weekend. Bring your friends and family along, too--you never know where an idea shared with others may lead.

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Day 2: Clothe Creatively

For our second challenge, it’s all about your duds: how to be more creative about how you use both the clothes you wear day to day—and the clothes cluttering up your closet that you wished you’d never bought.

As minimalistic lifestylemovements have begun to grow in recent years, many people have become sensitized to the fact that owning more stuff is not so much a guarantor of genuine happiness as it is a recipe for stress and depression. Naturally, people are responding to this insight by clearing the clutter out of their closets: big plastic bags filled with clothes make their way out the front door to a consignment shop, a donation bin, or a curb, and we immediately feel a bit lighter and freer.

Unfortunately, the volume of clutter making its way out of our wardrobes reveals a fundamental cultural and environmental challenge. Increasingly low prices have induced us to by lots of cheap clothes that only sort of fit, only kind of look good, and don’t really last. These clothes are not only made at a high human and environmental price, they have a detrimental, long-term environmental cost since they typically wind up in a landfill where they will decompose very, very slowly for years to come.

That’s where our next challenge comes into play. Before you throw out your latest dud, why not try and find a way to repurpose it? In the short and insightful video that inspired this challenge, contributors from Grist recommend converting unwearables into rags for cleaning or, in another article, taking that not-quite-perfect piece to a tailor to be resized and reconfigured to suit you. If neither of these options appeal, you can always look up a local textile recycling center where they can repurpose your unwearables for you.

What we wear is one of the primary ways we express our creativity today--why not extend that God-given creativity a bit further and seek out new ways to reduce the impact of our wardrobes on the environment while we're at it?

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Day 3: Think Ahead, Discard Less

Our third challenge picks up on the theme of landfills and decomposition we began yesterday: we invite you to consider the products you use and throw out regularly and to try out their more sustainable alternatives.

Once you start to think about it, you realize that there are so many one-time use and short shelf-life products in our lives. For instance, if you start to think about it while you’re standing in the bathroom brushing your teeth, you might observe that we’re encouraged to replace our toothbrushes once every three or four months: that means that by the end of the year, the nearly 320 million people who live in America may discard between as many as 960 million and 1.3 billion toothbrushes. If you were to keep looking around your bathroom, your kitchen, your home, and your office, you would likely find many more examples of items we discard regularly whose final destination is the landfill across town.

However, it only takes a bit of brainpower and commitment to begin reducing our one-time uses and trash output: why not invest in a set of ethically sourced napkins, cloths, and handkerchiefs, for instance, to replace paper towels and tissues? Or for the more adventurous among you, why not try and make your own shampoo, cleansers, or toothpaste? Once you start thinking about how you can live more sustainably, a whole world of opportunities opens up.

Of course, a lot of this stuff might seem kind of weird when you first start out since it’s different from what you’re used to, but everything new starts out that way. Even the products that we take for granted today were new and weird to someone at some point.

The debate for the best sustainable alternatives to the modern toothbrush is ongoing, but that needn’t stop us from making other viable changes that are available to us today. We may yet live to see the day when a sustainable oral hygienic alternative is invented--these are exciting and innovative times.

In the meantime it will take thoughtfulness, patience, and resolve to live with environmental integrity. Let’s start thinking ahead and see if we can’t shift away from a culture of one-time use, one item at a time.

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Day 4: Save the Drops

For our fourth challenge, we invite you to measure and moderate your water use today.

“Water, water everywhere nor any a drop to drink.”

If you recognize this line, you’ll know that it’s the lament of an aged sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, who was trapped at sea with nothing to drink for an indefinite amount of time. (And if you didn’t, now you know!)

At first, this sounds like a paradox of sorts: how can you die of thirst when you’re sailing on the ocean of all places? This reaction, while intuitive, probably means you’ve never tried to drink saltwater yourself. Humans figured out the hard way a long, long time ago that the saltwater we find in the ocean must be desalinated before we can drink it.

As it turns out, there is a very limited supply of freshwater available to us on the planet, and we share that water not only with one another but with many different ecosystems as well. Desalination systems which convert saltwater to freshwater, though improving in efficacy and energy consumption, are still quite costly, so it’s up to us to find ways to moderate our water usage in the meantime.

Today we challenge you to pay attention to your water use and figure out how and where you can conserve. Take this simple, interactive survey by the GRACE Communications Foundation to determine your water footprint and learn how you can conserve water in both your visible and “invisible” uses of this vital natural resource. It turns out we can save water not only when we do the dishes and take showers but when we shop, eat, and travel, too.

Sometimes it may feel like our conservation efforts only amount to drops in a bucket—but droplets have a funny way of building up over time. And the more water we save now, the more time we give ourselves to invent new and sustainable ways to harness and share this precious resource in the future. Let's start by saving a few drops today.

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Day 5: Go on an Adventure!

When was the last time you went outside and just plunked down on the ground to soak up a bit of sun? Feel the wind on your face? Listen to birdsong and stare up into the sky?

For our fifth challenge, we encourage you to get out and spend some time in nature: go on an adventure to rediscover what it is you love about the environment and why you think it’s worth preserving.

If you’ve been following our Earth Week Challenge this week, you know that it’s not always easy to go green. Going green can often mean sacrificing something familiar or convenient for something unusual and even uncomfortable, especially at the start.

Rather than call it quits when green living stretches us, why not take some time to go outside and rejuvenate our minds and bodies in the natural world? Even a few minutes spent in nature can have incredible restorative effects and can galvanize our gratitude and determination to continue challenging our limitations. Bring your friends or family along, too, if you like, and create a few new, cherished memories on your way.

You may wait until the weekend to complete this challenge--but there’s also no reason why you couldn’t go on an outdoor adventure today. Check out Alastair Humphrey’s site on microadventures if you need some inspiration.

Bon voyage!

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Day 6: Grow Green Thumbs

Our sixth challenge probably requires the most commitment and discipline of anything we’ve invited you to do so far. Today, we challenge you to grow green thumbs—and get a little dirty.

There are many different ways you could complete this challenge. You could finally get around to building that garden you’ve always dreamed of, whether by getting out there with a spade or by picking up that book that tells you what spades are for and how to use them effectively. You could transform your windowsill into a makeshift herb conservatory and grow some of your own food or even your own tea. Or you could commit to the care of a potted plant, which can be a challenge in itself if you’ve never done it before.

Basically, we challenge you to plant and grow something because there are few lessons as straightforward about the value of life than those that come from giving, nourishing, and protecting the life of something else. We experience this every day to some extent in our relationships with family and friends—why not extend the circle of love and figure out what it really takes for life to grow at one of its most basic and vital levels?

We’re not going to pull a Plato and suggest that the ideal society is made up of farmer-kings (interesting though the thought may be); but we do invite you to reconnect to that realm of experiential, organic knowledge on which human societies always ultimately depend.

Grow a green thumb and we promise that, from the food you eat to the nature that surrounds you, you’ll begin to see the world in a new way.

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DAY 7: Battle Apathy—Create Hope

Today we release our seventh and final Earth Week Challenge: we invite you to battle apathy with hope.

When confronted with the magnitude of the challenges we face in this world, from the environment onward, it’s easy to lose hope that we’ll ever change our societies for the better. Rather than deal with the pain of lost hope, many of us become apathetic, doubting that change will ever happen, insisting that we’re indifferent to or unaffected by the lack-luster way things are.

Of course, some of the best remedies for apathy are perspective, engagement, and creativity, and if we take just a few steps back, consider a bit more of the picture, we’ll find that not all hope is lost and that opportunity for proactive change abounds.

Bhutan, a mountainous nation situated between China and India, has achieved not only carbon neutrality but carbon negativity since 2009. Individuals like Boyan Slat and his team at The Ocean Cleanup are also out there creating the technologies we need to reverse the detrimental effects of our environmental footprint.

These are just two of the many incredible examples of ingenuity emerging all around the world—with some effort and innovation, you could be the source of the next.

What positive news have you heard or seen lately? What have you already been doing to make the world a greener place? Comment below about your work or your Earth Week Challenge experiments and spread the hope!

Thanks for joining us on this weeklong journey to make our world greener, cleaner, and brighter. We hope you were able to pick up a few things you can apply to create meaningful environmental change in your life. A great next step would be to make a long-term plan with your family about what you can do to take care of the environment together.

On DP Life, we strive to deepen our understanding of God’s original vision for humanity. We were inspired to initiate this Earth Week Challenge because we believe that God has called all human beings to be creative and responsible stewards of the environment and we wanted to do our part. To read more about God’s hope for humankind, check out our DP Insights page here.