Happy New Year!

Resolve to make a difference in 2009. Your daily activities and habits have a tremendous impact on the environment. In the new year, make a resolution to enjoy, protect, and respect our aquatic world. Thoughtful choices today can improve the health of the environment and without drastically changing your lifestyle. Use one less plastic bag. Reduce, reuse and recycle. Volunteer during a field clean-up. Carpool. Together, let’s ensure peace and prosperity for all creatures on our blue planet for years to come. Here are nine simple actions to get you started.

Holiday gifts for the animals

It’s a time of giving at the National Aquarium. Each year around the holidays Aquarium staff members come together to build new enrichment toys for the animals. Animals, like people, need to play, exercise, and be creative each day. The animal care staff works hard throughout the year to think of new ways of making everyday materials into items that enhance the animals’ environments and stimulate their minds.

Last week staffers were busy working to finish the items in time for the holidays!  At the end of the day there was a room filled with bird toys and perches from colorful wooden blocks and PVC pipes, reptile hides/caves from carpet, a play gym from hula hoops for the birds, new colorful hoops for the dolphins, foraging boards from turf and fleece for the tamarins, a sleeping nest from a barrel for the sloths, a new target poles for training the rescued sea turtles and more!

Visitors also had the opportunity to build enrichment items for their pets at home. Click here to learn fun and easy ways to enrich the lives of your pets at home.

Have any interesting ways that you enrich your pet’s environment? Please share with us!

Have an eco-friendly holiday

Green Tip #4: Going green for the holidays. When it comes to conservation, it’s the little things that matter most. Give a gift to the environment this holiday season by taking the time to conserve! Here are 10 ways to have an eco-friendly holiday:

1. Buy a potted or “balled” Christmas tree and replant it after the holidays. You can create a year-round habitat for local wildlife.
2. Recycle or mulch a cut tree for use in gardens and playgrounds. Avoid discarding it in a landfill.
3. Replace plastic bows with reusable cloth ribbons. Save gift wrap and ribbons to decorate next year’s gifts.
4. Wrap gifts with colorful pages torn from magazines, the Sunday comics, last year’s calendar or old maps and posters.
5. Instead of wrapping paper use decorative tins, baskets, boxes, or fabric bags.
6. Conserve electricity by installing a timer on holiday lights. And invest in LED holiday lights.
7. Send Internet holiday greeting cards or traditional cards made from recycled paper.
8. Trim your tree with edible ornaments like popcorn, cranberries or gingerbread cookies! Later, move your tree into the yard to give the birds a holiday treat!
9. Enjoy a delicious cup of organic hot coco. Cocoa contains twice as many antioxidants as red wine.
10. Give holiday gifts of “time” to your family and friends. Nothing is more valuable!

 

Making a statement to Save the Bay

On the 25th anniversary of the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort, The Baltimore Sun reported that a group of over a dozen of scientists and activists have released a statement to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program calling for a more aggressive commitment to cleaning up the bay. Sun reporter, Tim Wheeler, has also blogged about this subject showing a dramatic image illustrating the poor health of the Bay.

This plea for better tactics and enforceable measures is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last one presented to officials charged with bay restoration. Officials at the National Aquarium are standing in line with all of the Chesapeake Bay advocates encouraging mandatory, enforceable measures put in place in the areas of agriculture, zoning, development, wetland restoration, the list goes on.

The Aquarium’s conservation team and volunteers spend endless hours each year restoring wetlands in and around Maryland and educating visitors on watershed health. And there are countless organizations leading their own charges, doing their part to “Save the Bay”.

The message has been made clear. Voluntary efforts to restore the bay have not succeeded. The bay’s importance to the 15 million people whose waters drain to it, from Washington, D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and as far north as upstate New York, cannot be overstated. We now know that better results over the next 25 years will only be seen through the creation of consistent, mandatory practices.