A year ago I visited an old friend. After a nice dinner with her family and the consequential clean up of the kitchen I asked, "Where do you keep your recycling bin?" She looked at me incredulously. "Just throw it in the trash."

Upon further examination of her environment, I found that she was using the recycling bin as a litter box in her garage. "Oh, that thing!" she says. "We were keeping a bunch of tools in it for a while, but I turned it into a litter box."

In a way, I was glad that she was using the recycling bin for something, which in itself is a form of recycling. At least it wasn’t buried in a land fill.

If your recycling bin is in the garage holding muddy boots or storing junk, you might want to rethink your habits.

You may have friends who have made little changes: they now recycle, carpool and take cloth bags to the grocery store. Maybe you’ve even stopped buying bottled water and tote around your own coffee mug. On the large side of things, perhaps you or your family and friends have given up meat, buy organic or now drive hybrid cars. There are countless ways to reduce waste and pollution while saving precious resources, but many people end up asking: Can one person really make a difference?

If we are awake to it, life's humor is everywhere, as environmental educator, artist and banjo player John Francis, Ph.D., would be the first to agree.

On the overcast spring afternoon when I meet the author of Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step At A Time, at his pastoral home in Point Reyes Station, California, a large truck delivers a brand-new washer and dryer. In the ebb and flow of life, the man who walked more than 25,000 miles over the course of three decades, often camping under bridges and in farmers' fields, has become a householder, with a wife, four-year-old son, and two-car garage. For Francis, it is the latest turn of the wheel in a lifelong pilgrimage promoting earth stewardship, environmental awareness and world peace, interdependent threads in life's weave.

Twelve simple ways you can help stem the tide of polluted runoff.

Everyday household activities are a major contributor to polluted runoff, which is among the most serious sources of water contamination. When it rains, fertilizer from lawns, oil from driveways, paint and solvent residues from walls and decks and even waste from pet Fido are all washed into storm sewers or nearby lakes, rivers and streams -- the same lakes, rivers and streams we rely on for drinking, bathing, swimming and fishing. Here are some ways you can help reduce polluted runoff.

Our Mother Earth gives to us freely and unconditionally, but we have not always honored her. We have raped her of her natural resources. We have exploited her and used her again and again. She is essential for our existence, yet we have taken her for granted.

Energy shortages, power crises, petro-chemical pollutants, ozone depletion, hazardous waste, nuclear radiation, bioengineered crops - these are all the nightmares of a technological world raging forward against natural laws.  In the midst of this technological onslaught, we have become conditioned to believe that technology is the inherently evil nemesis of nature forever destined to be Yin and Yang at incompatible odds with one another.  Our modern society perpetuates this belief that one must be sacrificed for the other.  This belief has left available only the illusory options of either abandoning the "urban" life for huts in the forest, and cots in the ashram, or supporting a society which plunders natural resources to sustain the modern lifestyle of our unabated modern day consumerism.

Very few among us can deny that we are living in exciting times of change. The recent hurricanes in Florida, the tsunami in Indonesia, and the changes in our environments, all beg the question: Is this the time of the Apocalyptic predictions that the Bible and most major world religions foretold? The warnings of global economic collapse, predicted long ago, may well occur within the year. The environment is teetering on the edge. Nuclear war still exists as a threat to society, and it’s new offshoot, biological warfare. Violent storms and changes in weather patterns, sun flares, magnetic fluctuations continue to remind us how very alive and dynamic Our Earth is, and how much our survival depends upon Her.

One of the main themes of Planet Under Pressure is the way many of the Earth's environmental crises reinforce one another. Pollution is an obvious example - we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky-clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far.

I've always wanted to do my part for the Environment, but I didn't know where to start. I've decided to do this because I'm sure there are a lot of lazy people like me out there, who want to do something but not put out any effort. So I've decided to do the work so they don't. Now, I've done "my part" for the environment by figuring out what can be done, and passing the info on to others. These are things everyone can do!