Subscribe to THIS - The Green Life

Any sailor that is not also a bit of an enviro fantatic is quite literally missing the point. Sailing and the cruising life are probably the most perfect living lesson for how to reduce your environmental footprint yet invented. Did you know the average American uses 200 gallons of fresh water per day? Did you know that Don Quixote's water tank for 5 people for 4 days is only 80 gallons? Tell me you don't learn really quickly how to do more with less when you live on a boat.

Yet, you can always learn more. The conservation movement offers sailors endless ideas for how to make our boat lives simpler and more environmentally sensitive. There are products available to us now thanks to the efforts of the E.U. to reduce carbon use that were not available a mere ten years ago.


To keep up with all these changes and ideas, I subscribe to a daily blog sponsored by the Sierra Club called The Green Life. It mixes proselytizing of The Environmental Movement with generally useful tips on how to decrease water and power use, find less caustic products to clean our stuff and selves, and where to find the latest in green tech. And while some is not applicable to our lives, much we already “do even more with considerably less”, about once a week I get a great tip that I turn around and apply on our boat. Example? This Oct 16 tip on how to replace chemical mothballs with pungent herbs.