Welcome to Sustainable Family Home! I’m Grant, and I’m super excited you’re here. My goal is to help you and your family help the Earth, one simple step at a time. What does that mean? Let’s increase the level of sustainability in your home and general lifestyle, and to do it all while maintaining the hectic day-to-day operation of keeping a family running, especially if your family includes young kids (like mine). We’re only going to get one chance with this planet to keep it nice, and before we break it, we need to do whatever we can to keep it in the best condition possible, because those little kids are going to be the ones who grow up and have to deal with the Earth we left for them.
So much of the news lately is not-so-great for the Earth: More carbon emissions. Higher sea level temperatures. Melting ice caps. It’s not like we can take some ice from our freezer and drop them in the Atlantic and be able to say we helped. BUT…if we all take some easy steps in our normal lives, those simple tasks can add up to something! For example, just imagine if no one in your town every threw wasted food away in the trash again. That food wouldn’t take up space in a landfill, then the landfill would product less methane gas while that food decomposed (and not in the best way), and the compost created from that diverted food waste could help to grow some delicious vegetables to eat. Old food = new food’s food! So, if you start composting, maybe your neighbor will start composting, and their neighbor will start composting, and so on…Earth friendly habits are contagious 🙂
Sound daunting? Think you have to go out and buy some chickens and plant every square inch of your yard with vegetables and start riding a llama to work? Hey, if you want to do those things, go for it! But there are little changes we can make in the course of our daily fast-paced lives that can make a difference too, even if it’s a small difference (spoiler: small differences count!).
In helping you improve your Sustainable Family Home, I’m going to help guide you with techniques, products, and helping to form new habits that lessen our impact on the planet. Most of them I’ll have incorporated into our house and my life, but not all; some may be a free or cheap option, and have a fancy option. I may have something of a Sustainability Wish List – goals to work toward when we’re able.
Now, am I some sort of sustainability PhD? Not really. I’m just someone who grew up on a farm and has an ingrained sense of environmental stewardship, which taught me to care what happens to our planet, and I have an understanding of environmental cause and effect. I’m also someone who understands what the chaos of a household of little kids is like (I have 3 children under 10) and that all of our decisions won’t be perfect. But if we can begin to work just a little bit at a time towards more sustainable choices, only good things can happen. Thanks again for visiting Sustainable Family Home!
Ready to get started? Take our quiz to find out where you currently stand and get some direction on where to start!