Fighting Climate Change with Carrots

Who says you have to go far from home to find good food? Andy’s here to show us an easy – and delicious – way to shrink your carbon footprint right in your backyard – growing carrots for caribou!

Growing your own vegetables (in a traditional garden or even just in pots) and being able to prepare them in your own kitchen can save thousands of miles in transportation that food normally takes before reaching your plate. Not only do you eliminate the shipping miles from where the food is grown (often across the country or even across oceans), but you reduce car trips to restaurants and supermarkets. You pare down your greenhouse gas emissions and save money on gas! (And these days, who’s going to argue with that?) Throw in learning the art of canning or preserving your vegetable harvest and you can have vegetables all year round grown right from your own backyard.

Efforts to cut carbon emissions could not come at a more important time. This week, the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization that advises major economies on energy policy issues, revealed that worldwide carbon dioxide emissions from energy production spiked in 2010, rising to 30.6 gigatonnes (Gt), a 5% increase over the 29.3 Gt released in 2009. (A “gigatonne” – that’s a one followed by 9 zeros – is a pretty abstract number. It’s about equal to the emissions of 200 million cars.)

Defenders’ climate change expert Aimee Delach says this new information means that either emissions need to start leveling off much sooner than 2020, or we will greatly increase our chances of much higher temperature increases – of the sort that will put millions more people at risk of sea level rise, produce heat waves that put to shame the hottest summers of the 20^th century and significantly decrease the yields of important crops.

Does this new round of bleak news mean that all hope is lost for preserving a world whose climate resembles that we were born into? Of course not: it means we need to redouble our efforts to convince our leaders that emissions reductions are a worthy national goal. But we can’t just wait for Congress and international negotiations to take concrete action – everyone has a role in reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Andy’s doing his part by growing vegetables—what are the ways YOU’RE working to shrink your carbon footprint and fight the climate change that threatens our wildlife and natural places? We want to know! Read these simple instructions and tell us what YOU’RE doing to protect wildlife from the harmful effects of climate change.