an hour of introspection:come join us

We welcome and request everyone to join us at the Earth hour for an hour of self-reflection.

Date: 27th March 2010

Time: 8:30 to 9:30 PM

Location: your home and mine

celebrating life: world water day

Hey everyone. Have you been noticing the blue World Water Day logo on the blog.

We hope that you are aware of its meaning. Here is some information for those of us who still do not know about it.

Water or the growing scarcity of its usable for is becoming a bigger concern day by day. But then why care? We need to care because water is the single most important entity that makes life possible on Earth (even more important than oxygen). That is so because even if you don't have oxygen on the planet, you can extract it from water (H2O), considering water is there. Keeping this in mind presence of water on this great planet is somthing that we should celebrate (and appriciate).

United Nations has decided to celebrate the 22nd of March' 2010 as World Water Day. Lets at least keep one day to bring change in our lives for the long term benifit of our mother (Earth) and its sons/daughters (Us). Keeping the busy life schedulde of most of us Sanrakshan has thought of celebrating water on 21st of March (Funday-Sunday). We request and invite you to join us to celebrate somthing that has made our life on Earth possible.

See you all there.

footprint.......why should i be bothered

As promised in the earlier post, here we are with some information on 'how does foot printing help the environmental cause and how you can get involved'.

Remember how we talked about standing on a beach in Goa and seeing the size of our feet. Just imagine how you would have been able to choose those beautiful and stylish shoes if you didn't know what size your feet were. So, what you will do is that you will buy random shoes and test them out at home. Some will be useful and some useless. What happens to the useless? The are just junked.

Same analogy can be employed in case of 'environmental footprint'. If you don't know your 'environmental foot' what kind of resources will you use? You will use (or at least try to use) random resources that catch your fancy. Some of them can be categorised 'can't do without' some 'can do without but like it'. Basically, some resources we need and some we don't (or don't need as much). So, what happens to the resources that we don't need? They are junked. This may be food, water, electricity, heat or any other resource that we use. Some of use run water through a pipe while we can wash our car with a bucket (or a couple of) of water. We run our ACs at minimum temperature and sleep in a blanket. We travel on SUVs (with 2Km/l average) while we have small cars (with 16-18 Km/l) average. In fact we travel in a car while we have the world's best metro trains.

Anyway, if we knew the effect that our resource consumption is having on the environment, we might think and act in a more sensible manner. So, by calculating our footprint we can understand how much water we use, what effect our energy use is having on the environment and other similar issues. So, sum it all its very important that we chose only the right size shoes (the one that we buy out of need and not greed) and to choose those we need to know the size of our feet (our footprint).

Now, to the next question. how can you get involved?
Simply by living a sustainable lifestyle. Each one of us can assess our footprints and try to keep it (or reduce it) to a minimum level of need. There are several websites which can help you do that. All of them may have a different methodology and hence your footprint may vary in each one but the may help you get an indication about you lifestyle and the need of reduction.
Here are a few websites (we will try to add a good widget for the purpose on the blog in the coming days):

• http://ecoguru.panda.org/#/home
• http://www.myfootprint.org/
• http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/home

If you take the help of 'google god' you will be able to find many more such sites. Please let us know if you stumble upon something good.

Meanwhile, lets get our sizes measures and buy only the right shoes. Lets not leave behind us a junk pile of shoes for our kids to figure out.

footprint.....whatever is that !!!!!

'Footprint' is a word that is now being popularly used by environmentalists working in all the various fields. While this has become a common usage in the academic circles, the common man (and woman) is slowly getting the hang of the word.

So, to answer the query, 'what is footprint' that came to us, we are writing this post.

Imagine standing on a beach in Goa......

As you step away from the location

You can see what you have left behind. A pair of feet on the sand. This footprint on the sand signifies the amount of land that you used to stand. It is the amount of land resource that you need.

What does that mean in the perspective of the environment? It simply means that your 'environmental footprint' signifies the amount of resources that you use during the course of your daily lifestyle. This is the print of your feet on the environment or the nature around you.

Now a days footprints are being taken into account for all the various resources we use. So, you can have a 'carbon footprint' for the amount of Green House Gases that you emit due to your activities like power usage, travelling, cooking etc. You can have a 'water footprint' for the amount of water you use in your daily life. 'Footprints' can be calculated for Industries, Households and even Individuals.

How does foot printing help the environmental cause and how you can get involved will be taken up in the subsequent posts.

an hour for the Earth

You must have noticed the 60 EARTH HOUR banner on the blog. Let me take a moment to talk about that. Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million homes and businesses turned their lights off for one hour to make their stand against climate change. Only a year later and Earth Hour emerged as a bigger movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as the, Sydney Harbour Bridge, The CN Tower in Toronto, The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Rome’s Colosseum, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.

What is the cause? Its the one recent cause that binds us all, one recent threat that threatens us all, its Climate Change. Earth Hour signifies a stand against the energy wastage (in my view), which is one of the biggest causes of increase in green house gasses and thus Climate Change. If we only use as much as we need, the Earth can be a better place.



This year Earth Hour is is being organised globally on the 27th of March Saturday (a holiday after that). A little effort from all of us can go a long way in changing a lot of things.

Lets get together and organise Earth Hour in our localities and Vote for Earth. Sanrakshan is also planning to get some events together for the Earth Hour. Please let us know of your thoughts, ideas, suggestions on that.