High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : A Few Ways to Make Earth Last a Little Longer

Feel the quality of life slipping away?

Check out the latest work by John Javna, North Berkeley author of 20 books. It’s a modest 96-page blue-and-gold paperback titled “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth.”

Javna’s Top 10 list:

1. Turn down your water heater. For every 10 degrees, you save 6% of the energy previously used. The recommended setting is 130 degrees.

2. Put a plastic bottle in your toilet tank. You can save between 3,000 and 5,000 gallons of water a year. (Don’t use a brick, because bricks can dissolve and clog the water system.)

3. Install low-flood faucet aerators and shower heads. A family of four can save 17,000 gallons of water a year.

4. Keep your car’s tires properly inflated. You will increase gas efficiency by up to 5%. About 50% of America’s cars have under-inflated tires. If they were all inflated properly, we could save up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline a year and prevent up to 40 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, the primary “greenhouse gas,” from entering the atmosphere.

5. Bring your own shopping bag. It takes a 15-year-old tree to provide 700 grocery bags, and grocery shoppers use billions of bags every year.

6. Eliminate waste before you buy. Packaging waste accounts for about one-third of all the garbage Americans send to landfills. For a start, buy eggs in cardboard, not Styrofoam cartons, and buy beverages in recyclable glass or aluminum containers.

7. Recycle cans, glass and paper. The energy saved from one recycled aluminum can will operate a television set for three hours.

8. Replace a regular (incandescent) light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb. It uses a quarter of the energy and will last 10 times longer. And it will keep a half-ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere over the life of the bulb.

9. Buy rechargeable batteries for household use. Americans use 2 billion disposable batteries a year and 75% of them contain mercury, a highly toxic substance that can leak from landfills into soil and ground water.

10. Set the blades higher on your lawn mower. Forget the manicured look and cut the grass two to three inches high. This encourages the roots to grow deeper and helps retain moisture in the soil, requiring less water.

The pay gap between male high school and college graduates has more than tripled since the early 1970s, according to a University of Maryland economist as reported in the November issue of NEA Today, the newspaper of the National Education Assn.

In 1973, a 30-year-old college graduate earned 16% more than a 30-year-old high school graduate. Today, due to the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs, the income gap is a whopping 50%.

Tired of waiting in lines? Well, stand in line to file your complaint.

The typical American will spend about 4 1/2 years of his or her life waiting in lines--with supermarkets and banks as the primary offenders, reports Robert Brain Associates, a New York sales production firm, after surveying 1,000 Americans in eight cities. Other key sources of line aggravation are post offices, airline counters, department stores and movie theaters.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read.”

--Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)