Tomorrow is officially Earth Day, but if we love being on this earth everyday should be Earth Day. Everyday we should be conscious about preserving this earth as we know it for our children. Here in North Carolina where open spaces and trees about, sometimes it’s easy to take for granted that all this beauty and nature surrounding us will always be there.

It is scary when you are presented with just how vulnerable this earth is when even just one factor is changed. Last year, was a very dry year for North Carolina and the whole South Eastern United States. The photo on the left shows just how dramatic the drought was illustrated by our dwindling lake levels. Yeah, that’s one of our local lakes. The water line should have been where the trees are. Instead, the empty lake bed has started to grow grass and the water is looking more like a stream than a lake.

Recreation and fishing at our lakes ended early and have been virtually non-existent through autumn and fall because there just wasn’t enough water at the lakes. It’s only now after a few good rain storms that the water levels have started rising again. Some of the drought restrictions have been lifted, but we’re not quite out of the woods yet.

I hope that with Earth Day tomorrow, people will maintain their commitment of conserving water and being more mindful of what we dump into our waters. For us we’ll continue the water conservation efforts we’ve implemented around the house as we found that it really wasn’t that much of an impact on our lifestyle once we got used to it. Some of the few things we’ve done: install low flow shower heads, low capacity flush, no outdoor watering. As many of you know, we keep a vegetable garden so towards the end of last summer we also had to stop watering as part of the conservation effort. As a result, we’ve acquired a rain barrel to collect water for the garden, and we’ve also been recycling rinse water from washing dishes to moisten our compost bin.

A great discovery came out of that rinse water, by the way. We found out that the slightly soapy water from rinsing dishes deterred bugs from the compost! Isn’t that great?

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On a separate but related note (for Entrecard users):
I just came across this contest from A Girl for All Status via Entrecard which prompted me to write this post. Today’s the deadline for her contest, but if you see this early enough, maybe you still have a chance to join in.