Earth Month is Every Month

Okay, I think everyone should treat every month like Earth Month, but in reality the world officially celebrates it in April. One of my favorite things about Disney is the Company's commitment to the environment. We even have a word for it: Environmentality, which basically means to keep a commitment to act with the environment in mind. This is something that I always cared about a bit, but now live even more intentionally mostly due to my time being a Conservation Education Presenter at Animal Kingdom. 

Now, I could make countless posts about ways to live intentionally using Environmentality in everything you do so I won't go into too much detail in this post. Additionally, the longer I have worked for Disney I still continue to be amazed by the efforts that I am continually learning about. With a resort as large as Walt Disney World we sure do produce a lot of waste, but the Company has teams of people that work to find ways to divert that waste from landfills, wether it is your basic recycling, making dog toys out of old costumes, participating in Clean the World, composting, and the list goes on! 

Wearing my Environmentality button from
Old Key West's Earth Day event showing off the
homemade jam I bought at the Team Disney
farmers market

For Earth month there were a lot of activities around property including local Earth Day events at the various parks, resorts, and office buildings, voluntearing with nature preserves or recycling efforts, and even seminars and webinars as well! 

Spending 7 months teaching thousands of guests about conservation, it is still something I am very passionate about. So I attended a couple of Earth day events, including one at Old Key West, one of the resorts I work with, bought local goods from a farmers market set up at team Disney (I even won a raffle!), and I was even honored to be invited out to Saratoga (another of my resort partners) to help with a Purple Martin nest check. These birds are a migratory bird that is threatened of lack of nesting space so people around the country use these birdhouses and gourds to give them a place to nest. Disney has a bunch of them on property and we check and band the birds so we can see how the populations are doing, band for future observation, and make sure parasitic birds-birds that lay eggs in other birds nests- don't take over the nests.This was such a cool opportunity and I felt honored to have been asked to participate. I even got to hold a baby bird, even if it did poop all over my hand! 

Baby purple martins!

To show off my Environmentality every day, I have added elements to my desk at work! I collect the Disney Conservation Fund buttons. These are fun to collect and the money donated goes to a great cause! I also was lucky to buy up a few old Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund signs to add to my wall to show off some of the amazing work that we contribute towards. Lastly, one of my favorites is a picture of some vultures at Animal Kingdom Lodge signed by members of the keeper team thanking me for helping out with enrichment training on World Vulture Day last fall! I'm continually adding and love having these reminders with me every day and enjoy the conservation starter they can be to people that stop by.

Now get out there, keep environmentality in the back of your mind, and learn more of the small things you can do to celebrate Earth Day every day!

Some old Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund (DWCF) posters that I bought

My treasured vulture picture

My pin collection which I am very proud of!