April - Earth Day is coming - Make a Book Tree, Grow a Plant and More
Welcome to April’s Saving the Planet With Plastic Girl! It’s our first one!
Saving the Planet With Plastic Girl is a newsletter/blog containing three sections with practical ways to enact change to help heal our planet. The three sections include an upcycle maker activity (video) to do at home, a local action item to promote sustainable communities, and a national/global action item to mitigate the climate crisis. The newsletter is sponsored by Wicked Tree Press, and written by Jessica Maison, author of the Plastic Girl series.
A note from the author: My daughters, Eva and Iris, were the inspiration of the two sisters in the Plastic Girl. Their generation is why I wrote this series and why I am doing this newsletter. They will be joining me monthly to walk everyone through the monthly upcycle activity with a fun video. They are the true experts in making and exploration. Special thanks to their dad, cameraman and editor, Michael Judd.
Earth Day occurs this week. It’s an urgent one because of this devastating pandemic. Covid-19 has, in a warped way, also made me hopeful that humanity can make the changes necessary to address climate change. We can stay/work at home more often and create more with less. It is also a special Earth Day for me because it is the release of my book, Plastic Girl. Along with this series, set in the wake of a climate apocalypse, I wanted to create a companion climate project connected to the book, something that gives back to the readers and the planet, something that can contribute in some small way to altering our course away from an extinction event, and so – Save the Planet With Plastic Girl was born.
I am a writer, but I have a background in enrichment and educational programming driven by the maker movement, environmental education, storytelling, art, science, and engineering. I’ve worked in schools, community centers, libraries and outside with young people doing everything from gardening to open ended art and maker workshops to stop motion animation and film workshops. I wanted to share some of the many project I have done with students throughout the year as well as present a few environmental action items each month.
The challenges facing our world with the climate crisis are urgent and critical, but we are not helpless. Making our household less wasteful is in our control. Supporting groups in our community that are working to make our neighborhoods more sustainable is manageable. Participating in at least one action items that demand larger global changes and keeps pressure on our leaders to enact those chances is something we can fit into a month’s schedule.
With that said, let’s have some fun and jump into Eva and Iris’s Upcycle Activity.
Eva and Iris’s Upcycle Activity — Book Trees
According to Wikipedia, Upcycling, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products of better quality and environmental value. We all love to make and create, but often these projects send us to the store to purchase items that will end up in a landfill. By looking around your house or going to a local thrift store, you can find many or most of the items you need to make so many cool projects. I want to show you one way to do that each month, so here we go!
Our first at home, upcycle activity will be a BOOK TREE. Book Trees are super cool and can be made using an old book, magazine, or manual. They can be a festive decoration at one of the holidays like at Halloween as a Wicked (or spooky) Tree.
You will need:
1.) An old book or magazine. You should use a book with at least 40 pages and under 200 pages. Once you go over 200 pages, the project becomes difficult. Eva says 120 pages in perfect.
2.) Box cutters if you have a larger book (box cutters are sharp so make sure you are careful.)
3.) Optional. Glue or hot glue if you have it.
4.) Optional. Old trinkets, seeds, buttons, etc. to decorate your tree when you are finished. You do not have to decorate your book tree. They are quite lovely unadorned which is the way I like them best.
Here is an awesome video of Iris and Eva walking you through the process.
Act Locally to Promote a Sustainable Community
It’s spring! Everyone’s favorite planting time. Growing our own food increases the sustainability and self-sufficiency of our own community, and it’s good for the soul. Normally, the local challenge would involve attending a local plant sale, plant mob, plant giveaway, or gardening workshop, but we are all sheltering-in-place and need to be safe. Instead, check out your local gardening organizations or shops to see if they are doing any virtual workshops, such as the ones being offered starting in May from UC Davis. If you are able to acquire an edible plant safely from a local shop, wonderful. Plant your edible plant in your garden or a pot at home (bonus points if you upcycle an item from around the house into a pot.) If you were not able to get one, you can take the bottom of a green onion from the grocery, put it in a jar with water by sunlight, and it will regrow. Once you see the regrowth, you can replant in your garden or your pot. Do it will the entire bunch and never buy green onions again. Currently, I am getting ready to transplant my cucumber plants from their containers into the ground. Feel free to ask questions in the comments. I am happy to help when I can. Please share picks of your plants!
Take Global Initiative (Complete One or Both of the Steps)
Engage with a new environmental non-profit.
This month’s highlighted organization is the 5 Gyres Institute. Their mission is: Empowering Action Against the Global Health Crisis of Plastic Pollution Through Science, Education, and Adventure. The 5 Gyres Institute has so many ways to get involved in reducing plastic in your home, community, oceans, and world. You can donate money to support their research and outreach, you can become an ambassador and help them with the outreach and education, you can participate in their research projects, or you can participate in their virtual classrooms and activities. On April 24th they are having viewing party for the documentary, The Story of Plastic, through their virtual Trash Academy program. We will be watching that video. Finally, teachers, they have peer-reviewed curriculum available that was selected by Next Generation Science Standards and featured as “Quality Example of Science Lessons and Units”.
Research a climate political or social action group.
Learn what the chosen group stands for and decide if they are for you. If they are, volunteer to support one of their action items. There are many of them which makes me feel hopeful. This month, we are focusing on the Sunrise Movement. Sunrise is a movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. Sunrise has a Sunrise School that has current sessions that are focused on the Coronavirus and the Green New Deal (April 21-April 24th.) They have separate sessions for high school students and younger to participate in. This session will give insight into who they are as an organization and if you fit in with their mission. My family and I signed up so we can understand the Green New Deal better.
Doing these actions make me feel more empowered, more educated, and more active in relation to the Climate Crisis. I personally have to break it into small tasks and changes to face it in a way that is manageable. I think committing to making one change in your house, participate in one local event, and performing one activist, educational or political item monthly is a way to make the change we need to make together. Doing the upcycle event is not only fun but also therapeutic. You are able to enrich yourself with a cool project while saving an item from the landfill and not purchasing another item to eventually end up in the same landfill. It’s a win, win, win.
Bonus: Climate-themed book recs
For kids and parents:
Cool for You by Marianna Linz and Caitlin B. Alexander. I picked this picture book up for my girls during its Kickstarter Campaign. It’s a beautifully illustrated book about the importance of keeping our planet cool and introducing kids to the science behind climate change. Its target age is 3-7 but my 10-year-old and I enjoyed it along with my 7-year-old.
For adults and teens:
Being the Change: Live Well and Spark and Climate Revolution. This one is non-fiction, good the soul and makes you feel that facing this horrific climate mess is possible while making you face the stark reality of it all (a spoon full of sugar approach.) The author is a climate scientist and father who embarks on his own journey to learn how to face the enormity and terror of climate crisis in a practical and sustainable way, while keeping your sanity and happiness.
My book (YA sci-fi, cli-fi adventure):
Plastic Girl was originally a short story inspired by my daughters having to face the climate crisis and my hopes and fears around that issue. It turned into an evolutionary sci-fi adventure series focusing on plastic and the next step of evolution. If you are one of the first 35 readers to order the Book Tree Bundle, along with a signed hardcover edition of Plastic Girl and a WTP reusable metal straw, we will also send a flawed copy of the prequel novella: Plastic Girl Evolution, so you can turn it into a Book Tree. The cool thing about this add-on is you can totally read it first. The printers messed up the covers but other than that, the story is the same. We didn’t want to throw them in the landfill.
As far as social, Wicked Tree Press is on Facebook. I am on Instagram and Twitter. Please feel free to follow me on either. I would love to hear from you in the comments below, directly through e-mail - (jessica@wickedtreepress.com) or on any of my social media platforms.
Thanks for joining us, loving the planet, and getting involved.
We must prevent future generations from actually living in the world of Plastic Girl,
and I know we can, together.
