A clean home is a beautiful home! If your home is your castle, then the outdoors must be your kingdom. In a way, we rule over all wildlife and woodland creatures. What we do in our home and around it directly affects our furry, feathered or scaly citizens. Most of us do not want to intentionally harm them, but many things we do can be detrimental to their health and survival.

Being green goes way past using all natural cleaners, recycling and saving energy. It means keeping our environment in the most natural state as possible. There are people who go to the extremes to keep the planet clean, but there are easy ways we can all help prevent our waste to getting onto the habitat of native creature.

Florida is known for its wide variety of aquatic life and is home to a large amount of woodland animals. When litter collects on roadsides, the shores of our lakes and beaches, the wildlife will often mistaken it for food or get entangled in it. Even the smallest piece of trash like cigarettes butts, released balloons, bottle caps, and plastic straws can be deadly to an animal. According to the Humansociety.org "250 million tons of trash is discarded every year in the U.S., a large amount of it ends up as litter. Plastic items become intestinal blockages; baited fishing lines entangle limbs, hindering movement and causing dismemberment; and aluminum cans with leftover soda or beer turn into razor sharp traps."

Recently a (warning graphic content) video has been passed around on social media of a marine biologist pulling a 13 inch plastic straw from a poor sea turtle's nose. It is hard to watch but is a grim reminder that everything we do has dire consequences.

Keeping our homes and world around it keeps everyone safe and healthy. Of course we all know the solution, sometimes we need reminding or a reason to stay diligent about the natural world around us. (source)