Oil Spill

The current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been weighing very heavily on my mind lately. It is so devastating in so many ways to our country that I can not even begin to imagine how long this will affect us negatively. The only thing I can hope is that some good can come of it. Maybe just maybe the average person will be more aware of the risks involved in the amount of oil we use in this country. There are so many things we can do to reduce our footprint and use less. I find myself thinking of ways that I can reduce my footprint less more and more through this catastrophe.
Some of the things we do in our family are:
* pay our bills online through direct pay to reduce the amount of mail that is needed to be delivered.
* cloth diaper, this not only reduces the amount of trips we have to make to town to get diapers but also reduces the amount of energy needed to produce them, not to mention there is less trash to be picked up and put in our landfills.
* Raise our own meat and garden not only so that we know where our food comes from, but it again reduces the amount of oil used both in our trips to the store but also in shipping of the products to the stores.
* Buying as much as possible locally for the same reasons.
* We use very little in the way of disposable products
* We think twice before we make a trip to town for no reason. We try to reduce our trips and consolidate.

I am constantly trying to think of other things we can do. It is in our faces right now, we have a golden opportunity to tell the oil giants that we are going to reduce our dependency upon then and find other ways to do the things that we feel we need to do.

I am all for going back to simpler times, using what we have and getting by without all the extras.

So what have you done in the past, lately or in the plans for the future to help our country be less dependent upon oil?