Blog Action Day

Today (well, yesterday now if you are in Australia) is the first Blog Action Day - where "bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone's mind."

In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment

For whatever reason, the readers (yes both of you) of this blog seem to be pretty 'liberal' minded, which I am guessing extends to the environment.

I've very long been so, both actively and passively. For over a decade I didn't drive a car - and rarely stepped in one, taxi or otherwise (though I have done a fair bit of air transport in my time - twice to Europe, several times to North America, once to Japan), quite a bit to the South Pacific and New Zealand, and increasingly around Australia.
These days, it is true, I have a lot of electronic devices, both in my house (several computers, TV/DVD, plus phones, cameras, video cameras, iPods and so on that need charging), but we use green power here - essentially, we pay a smallish premium for our power to be purchased from wholly renewable sources.

Our servers in the US are run by a carbon neutral hosting company (pair).

Going forward, we want our conferences to be carbon neutral as well - that is to offset the green house emissions that all those flights and so on generate, and to make it easy for our attendees to do so as well.

Is all this sufficient - not by a long shot. But I've learned over my time on this planet that the best intentions and strongest passion doesn't necessarily achieve a whole lot - 'from little things, big things grow'.
Tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, the way we live our lives will look largely similar to today. But making incremental changes - green power, carbon offsets, reducing our footprint, reducing our consumption and so on - in my mind stands a far greater chance of real long term systemic change than an all or nothing set of expectations.

Just do something starting today eh? A few "easy" things.

Make your web hosting sustainable
Offset the carbon from your car today
Switch to green power for your domestic or commercial power consumption
Work from home more

What suggestions have you got?