It takes 10 times as much grain to feed a person with an cow doing the initial digestion on the vegetable matter as not. Given how many of our compatriots are using agricultural lands to power their driving habits via ethanol, now is a particularly useful time to cut way back on meat eating. Particularly if you also want to live in a world without food riots.
I understand that not every person can make this change, but most of us don't have an excuse.
Sensational article here or a bit more sober but still plenty alarming link at Wikipedia.
The signs in Whole Foods about the cost of paper make it tempting (and Whole Foods will take back and claim to recycle plastic bags), but, if you haven't remembered your reusable bags, try to avoid the plastic anyways.
I am starting to write a series of entries telling people what to do (carbon tax, stop using bottled water) to protect the environment, and why it should be done (why as far as the physical, chemical, and biological effects that various actions have; global warming, plastic particles in wild animals on the bottom of the ocean). Before I address what and why, however, I would like to describe how to think about deciding what to do about our actions affecting the environment.
There is a whole body of various environmental derived theories of spirituality and ethics, but I'm not going to write about those. They mostly extend the ideas of rights or inherent value from just humans to other sentient beings or just to all of life, or even to landscapes as they existed before humans. The problem with these sorts of theories is that they tend to blow up a big beautiful romantic bubble of idealism that is popped the first time someone gets a roach infestation. It's fine to try regard all life as being equally deserving of legal rights as ourselves, but for many people that perspective is distant from why we should bend over and pick up some trash or stand up and turn off a light.