Want to make a difference on Earth Day? Go organic

Today is Earth Day. Forget for a minute the canard you've Heard about how every day should be Earth Day, and how we should love the earth, our universal mother. Popular as they are, such oversimple sentiments produce little of the meaningful change that Earth Day has been about for the last 34 years. If you want to make a difference, go organic.

That means two things, the simpler being a change in diet, and the second a more encompassing change in lifestyle. A basic organic lifestyle involves a commitment to buying — or, better yet, raising — produce grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or defoliant. Part of that is just a matter of taste. Organically grown carrots taste more like carrots, the tomatoes taste more like tomatoes and the apples taste more like apples, than the usual fare we settle for at the supermarket. Once the sole purview of health food stores, organic food in the last several years has moved into America's supermarkets, making it increasingly easier to find, even in the prepared foods section.

If you're already accustomed to eating organic produce, make the leap to other foods. Organic meats can be harder to come by than organic produce, but they are well worth the effort. As with organic produce, organic meat is at once more flavorful and far healthier than conventional meat, coming as it does from animals that are not confined to narrow cages nor subjected to the other inhumane conditions that are a standard practice among factory farms.

Besides food, there are any number of other organic practices that any of us can implement easily and reasonably cheaply. Skip the chemical fertilizers, and build the soil in your yard with natural supplements such as finished compost or organic fertilizers. Forget the pesticides, and add a birdfeeder or bat box to your back yard and let nature take care of the biting, stinging, crawling insects. A commitment to organic gardening makes for a much more beautiful and far healthier lawn in the long run than chemical treatments that leach the natural nutrients out of the soil, put young children at risk, and pollute our waterways.

Like anything else that is worth undertaking, adopting an organic lifestyle is something that will come in stages. Take the first steps today, and make this Earth Day one where you make a difference that will last a lifetime