The Cleaner Planet Playbook: A guide to being a helpful human on Earth

By Cyndi Recker

The Cleaner Planet Playbook

A Guide to being a helpful human on Earth

Do you want to have better health and live in a cleaner environment?

If you do, you are not alone. Research shows that sixty to eighty percent of people want to achieve better h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author Academy Elite
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885830713

Cyndi Recker

Cyndi Recker is a systems engineer working in the satellite com- munication space to connect you at thirty-thousand feet. She has engineered systems and software in multiple industries, including aerospace, transportation, and micro-electronics.She is the author of several papers, articles, talks, and intellectual property submissions. She uses engineering methods to break down complex topics to give simple steps that anyone can take to solve problems. She is a member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a certified fitness instructor. She lives in Arizona, loves playing outside, and her personal goal is to leave her campsite better than she found it.

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The Cleaner Planet Playbook

A guide to being a helpful human on Earth

CYNDI RECKER

Cleaner Planet Playbook © 2022 by Cyndi Recker. All rights reserved.

Published by Author Academy Elite

PO Box 43, Powell, OH 43065

AuthorAcademyElite.com

All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under international and federal copyright laws and treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the author.

Identifiers:

LCCN: 2022907989

ISBN: 979-8-88583-069-0 (paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-88583-070-6 (hardback)

ISBN: 979-8-88583-071-3 (ebook)

Available in paperback, hardback, and e-book.

Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) printed in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Author Academy Elite, nor does Author Academy Elite vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

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Love your Life

Contents

Preface

Introduction

PART 1: FIELD OF PLAY

Chapter One - Find Your Edge

Chapter Two - Problems and Solutions

Chapter Three - Patterns and Plays

Chapter Four - The Game Plan

PART 2: THE CLEAN ACTION PLAYBOOK

Chapter Five - You Are What You Eat

Chapter Six - Be good to your body

Chapter Seven - Your Home

Chapter Eight - Living your Life

PART 3: SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES

Chapter Nine - Community and Teamwork

Chapter Ten - Eco Ethics

Chapter Eleven - Revisit, Refine and Recharge

Chapter Twelve - Links to Learn More

References

About the Author

Preface

A chance meeting with a painter, a buoy and a pair of pants changed my perspective and cleaned up my daily habits.

Kauai, Hawaii, is known as one of the wettest places on Earth and in 2018 they endured record-setting rain. Bridges and roads had been washed out on the north shore, and a home had slid down the hill landing right in Hanalei Bay. I was staying on Kauai’s windward side, which sustained less water damage but had all types of debris washing in to the beach. Taking a walk on the beach, I saw a big, black orb bobbing in the distance. As I came closer, I could see it was a boat buoy that had broken away from its tether. It was beyond my reach, but I thought it would be good to pull it in when the tide was right.

A shop nearby had similar buoys in all colors and sizes hung along an entire wall of the building. Curious, I entered the shop to see if the owner would like another one to add to their collection. The owner of the shop was Ambrose, a painter, a surfer, the owner of the Kauai surf gallery. The bright yellow gallery was surrounded outside with old surfboards, buoys and other items appearing like they had washed in on a wave. Inside were stamped prints of plants, waves and surfers painted on paper, canvas and white painter pants. Our conversation began with the buoy, which quickly turned to ocean trash, lifestyle, surfing and art. Ambrose had a unique philosophy of life.

Ambrose told the story of thousands of Nike shoes that had washed up on beaches from Oregon to Hawaii and beyond. The shoes had spilled from a cargo ship and were still in good shape after their ocean journey. Then something interesting happened. People with a single shoe looked for others who might have the mate. This kicked off an international Nike shoe swap with people from other islands, with some people offering money to make a pair. It was a worthwhile effort, since the trade price was well below the retail price. The Nike shoes story along with others about lost fishing gear, and rubber duckies in the Pacific Ocean are from the book, Flotsametrics by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano. Flotsametrics provides an up-close experience with the swirling, six hundred twenty thousand square mile Great Pacific Garbage patch. The patch is a trash flotilla estimated at twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.

Ambrose was passionate about the ocean having been a lifelong surfer and devoted his time to understanding the problems of ocean dumping. He used his love for the ocean and nature to inspire his art work. His choice of paint colors were natural, and he used scraps of ocean debris to create images of seaweed and coral on canvas. Seaweed beds were stamped in brilliant colors of green and blue to represent a water garden. Vivid oranges and reds rendered images of coral with the sun coming through the water. Ambrose used shading to represent water from warm turquoise hues to cold, deep blue intense shades. His surfing experience revealed his in-depth knowledge of surfing spots from California to Hawaii. One of my favorite moments was when he pulled a worn copy of Surfing California by Allan Wright from his counter. He could recall his experience at every spot that we had been to on the California coast, describing the break, best times to surf and what would be a next progression in learning the sport. This was impressive given he had not surfed those spots in years, if not decades. His art also reflected his surfing passion with images of great surfers like Duke Kahanamoku.

Ambrose was impassioned when talking about the continual influx of ocean pollution washing up on the Kauai shores. I listened as he described his years on the island, how the environment had changed, and I realized he was placed in my path to deliver a message I would never forget. I left the Surf Gallery that day with a swirl of new ideas in my head and a custom pair of painted-painter-pants complete with a belt made of reclaimed fishing line.

After the trip, I kept thinking about my time with Ambrose. Erich Fromm’s ideas from his book, To Have or to Be? kept popping into my mind as I thought about my own personal philosophy. Fromm said, these two concepts can define how we live. The things we have may be our possessions, careers, homes, or achievements. Our values, mindset and connections including what we do to take action and be productive represents our being.

If all the environmental problems were easy to fix, they would have been solved by now. Before learning about the Pacific Garbage Patch, I was not aware of how my daily habits impacted my health or the environment. I had some good practices, like recycling, but those are easy to accomplish especially with the infrastructure now built around recycling. Returning home from vacation, I realized I had many wasteful habits and relied too heavily on convenience items. I thought that if I could take the time to fix a few problems and others did as well that the results would accumulate.

As a system engineer, my work has been to devise solutions and solve problems for an entire system instead of one part alone. My challenge was to decide which problems I could fix. After reading Flotsametrics, I focused on change around my plastic habits. I suddenly started seeing plastic everywhere, mostly in places where it didn’t belong. This was my reticular activating system (RAS) kicking in. Neuroscientists explain RAS as your mind moving toward your thoughts. You may have experienced this as well. Think about a time when you bought some clothing, a pair of shoes or a car. Suddenly you see that item everywhere. It is a way for your brain to filter what it is important to you at the moment.

If I could buy less in plastic and and use better vessels like glass or metal, I would take a step towards ebbing the flow of plastic into environment. The cost of this was mostly time in finding products I normally used that were packaged in something other than plastic. The first objective was to reduce the amount of plastic in the landfill. I then turned my attention to my body. I wanted to know if food packaging could taint the food it contained by transferring unwanted chemicals into the food or drink. I learned it can. My next goal was to avoid food and drink packaged in plastic.

Part of making a change is deciding what problem that you want to solve and how to go about doing it. I’ve always been a reductionist, chunking things down so that they’re understandable. Another goal I had was that I did not want change to break my budget or be time-consuming. Both aspects would drive me to give up or drop the new actions. By this time I had read many articles about how small steps and continuous improvement can lead to big results. My challenge was to make it easy for individuals to take action, have an impact, and potentially save money as well. I changed with small steps. Each day, I try to make a better choice than I did the day before.

As individuals, we can take our own actions to improve our lives and the health of the planet. Part of it requires a shift from clean ups which fix the downstream problems to stopping the problem upstream as much as possible. You also need to consider what you will stick with and works in your household. I can say that not all of my changes were embraced immediately. I still have too much stuff. I still live in a home that is larger than my current needs. I do not live alone though and need to navigate change with care for those I live with.

Like many of you, I am a working person with a family, trying to provide the best life I can. I am not an ecologist, nor work for any global save-the-planet organizations. There are plenty of global environmental problems to pick from to make a difference. The key is to make better choices today than yesterday. I view our environment as a system and our system needs some work. Any system out of balance does not function correctly. The goal of this playbook is to give actions for improving your health while reducing consumerism, adding to your recycling, reusing and upcycling all while keeping some convenience without breaking the bank.

Never cease to act because you fear you may fail.

- Queen Liliuokalani, The Last Queen of Hawaii

Introduction

Everything we do, everything we eat,

and everything we wear has an impact.

A dawn of fire casts its glow across the water as the sun rises over Galway Bay, changing the seawater from steel gray to deep blue. The sun glints off the water creating a sea of light across the surface. The icy cold steals her breath for a moment, then she is on her way to the meeting place. The water ripples a little with first a splash, then a snort, and up pops Mara from the water. They have been friends for over twenty years.

Dr. Ute Margreff, a dolphinonologist, has studied Mara for the past twenty years and received first-hand insights into Mara’s habits and behavior in the wild. Dolphins are one of the most recognizable ocean dwellers. They are characterized as playful, intelligent, and curious and many stories and scientific research have documented their behavior. Captive dolphins have been observed cleaning their tanks. Several stories show how dolphins have learned to save secret caches of trash for future treats of fish from trainers.

Dolphins in the wild use tools to capture food. They learn these skills from their families and peers. In one maneuver, called shelling, a dolphin traps fish in a shell then swims to the surface and shakes the contents into its mouth. Mothers teach calves to forage for food on the ocean floor. To protect itself from sharp coral or snappy crustaceans, a dolphin will snag a piece of sponge to cover and protect its snout.

When Ute and Mara are in the water together, Mara often brings gifts. Sometimes, it is a scrap of seaweed that Ute will nibble on while Mara watches. Sometimes the gift is trash found on the ocean floor or floating in the water. Once, Mara brought Ute something completely unexpected, a food processor—an out-of-place gift delivered from the sea floor.

There are many reports of odd things found on the ocean floor and among the tidewrack. When Mara foraged through the sea bed, it was not a simple task to retrieve the ten to twenty pound food processor. This was much larger and heavier than her typical gift. She would need to keep the food processor held tightly in her jaw as she rose to the surface with forces of water friction and gravity working against her. Mara, deliberate in her action, surrendered her gift to Ute.

Ute’s experience shows the physical threat to the dolphin’s habitat. Chemical and biological pollutants are present as well. The good news is that environmental awareness is growing with the information flowing like a river branching out across all different societal groups. Seeing problems is one of the first steps to solving them.

Our food and water contain toxic chemicals that our organs must try to flush from our body. These toxins come through genetically modified organisms (GMOs), pesticides, bacteria, and sometimes food additives described as Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) but really may not be when accumulated through all the foods we eat. Our homes contain toxins delivered through personal care products, cleaning supplies, and home furnishings that are treated with chemicals that can transfer to our skin and release gas into our environment. Although the human body is an amazing system that can detoxify and adapt, it can also fail when the load becomes too high, like an overloaded electric circuit that blows a breaker. When this happens, our bodies can no longer keep up, which results in system failure, leading to many chronic illnesses.

It is not only humans who are at peril. Environmental issues also affect nature and other animals. Some species have not survived environmental change and several of them become extinct every year. Extinction events include plants, animals, and insects. There are also cases where a species is not yet extinct, but their population has dwindled through loss of habitat and they may become extinct if an intervention is not made. Although species’ extinction predictions vary across different expert groups, the consensus is that the rate of extinctions is getting worse.

Although many believe individual actions alone won’t save the planet, changing what you can will collectively lead to improvement. You can start by considering what you eat and how you use energy, get around, and how you make your buying decisions. Starting with your own actions and then expanding change to those around you can encourage others to adopt cleaner habits as well. This can lead to even larger, collective results. Your actions may then influence those in your community, business, and government as well.

Can you think of one small change you could make to improve your health, reduce the environmental impact, and even keep some money in your pocket? Try thinking about a minor change that costs nothing. When you see a plastic bottle lying in your path, on a sidewalk, road, or path, pick it up and recycle it. It only costs a couple of seconds. It keeps