An everyday guide to saving the Earth

Thank you for visiting the website for Your Planet Needs You! An Everyday Guide to Saving the Earth

We are so pleased you have joined us and hope you can find lots of interesting and inspirational information links and organisations here that will help you live a greener lifestyle and understand some of the most pressing environmental challenges our planet faces today.

We are three eco-activists that have put forward positive and meaningful ideas on how you can contribute to saving the earth. We know that you can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

“This book is a practical, lucid, passionate, call to action”
Xanthe Gresham-Knight, Author and international storyteller

“A fantastically clear compendium of environmental issues… and simple ways to solve them. Anyone who wants to help save the world should read it”
Nathalie Fee, founder of City to Sea

About Your Planet Needs You!

If there was ever an urgency to stand up for your planet, for Mother Earth, this is the time.

What exactly are carbon emissions, fast- fashion, pandemics – among other things – doing to our world?

What are the most pressing global, environmental issues affecting us today?

What are the new resilience innovations and ecological trends?

What actions can individuals and communities take?

From plastic waste to pesticides, food production and chemicals, from the climate emergency to species extinction, this book is the essential guide to ethical living.

Your Planet Needs You! will show how you can be part of the solution to help make a better world, whatever age you are.

Buy the book
Read an extract

Video gallery

Meet the authors

Meet the authors

Bernadette Vallely

Bernadette Vallely, is an award-winning environmental campaigner of more than 35 years.

Her writing includes Penguin’s best -selling, 1001 Ways to Save the Planet, and The Green Home magazine. In 1990 she co- wrote The Young Person’s Guide to Saving the Planet with Debbie Silver. Thirty years later she brings her skills and knowledge to upgrade and re-write this guide for modern young people and environmental beginners and earth lovers everywhere.

Meet Bernadette

Amy Charuy-Hughes

Amy Charuy-Hughes, is an environmental campaigner from London. A BA Fashion Graduate and founder of Greener Together with Amy, Amy creates beautiful handmade reusable items to reduce everyday single-use products, available to purchase online via her website.

Amy has been working within the fashion industry throughout her education and early career life. After learning about The Ocean Cleanup, Amy made the decision to change her lifestyle, and has since been merging her career with her lifestyle choices.

Meet Amy

Bethan Stewart-James

Shwmae fy enw i yw Bethan. Hello my name is Bethan Stewart-James.

I am ten years old, and I live in Pembrokeshire in West Wales. My passion and joy is helping to save the planet (and I love Harry Potter, and dogs) as we only have one planet and we should try and save it, instead of trying to evacuate to Mars or looking for another way out of this sticky mess.

I have been interested in saving the planet ever since my brother told me there was an island of plastic in the sea (the sea is one of my favourite places).

My pride at school is and always will be a member of the Eco-club. The thing that motivates me most is saving the seas, as they are so important to me.

Meet Bethan

More about Bernadette Vallely

Bernadette’s favourite thing: “I love living near the sea, the ocean cheers and nourishes me.”

Among the many awards she has won for her ecological and community work includes being a United Nations Global 500 Environmental Laureate.

Bernadette has encouraged and mentored many young eco-activists around Britain and across the world. Her books include 1001 Ways to Save the Planet (Penguin) and she has written many books, reports and papers on environmental, women’s and community issues.  She has worked for the Women’s Environmental Network (WEN, which she founded in 1994), Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth and Save the World Club (which she co-founded as a charity in 2000).  She is co-author of Gender & the Climate Change Agenda: The impacts of Climate Change on women and public policy published by WEN for the 2010 UN Climate Conference, COP 15. 

From 2000-2010 Bernadette was instrumental in creating a multi-award winning urban arts project for Kingston Borough Council involving 15,000 local people and covering hundreds of metres of unsightly graffiti with community mosaic. 

In 2012, Bernadette and her husband Alexander, started the Shakti Sings Choir, with the aim  of bringing people together to honour the earth through song. Since then, thousands of members, of all ages and abilities, have sung to the earth, including at the opening ceremony at Glastonbury Festival, at the Stonehenge Summer and Winter Solstice celebrations and at concerts indoors and outside throughout the country.

Bernadette is a mother of two wonderful grown-up children, she is married and lives in Wales. She is actively living a green lifestyle and aims to plant 4,000 trees in the next decade.

These days Bernadette is also researching and writing about the history of women’s religion with a new series due in 2021 detailing the hidden history of Goddess worship in London.

Favourite walk: The Pembrokeshire National Coastal Path

Harvest time in the countryside, we made a winter vitamin C syrup from hedgerow berries

More about Amy Charuy-Hughes

Amy is particularly interested in the environmental impacts of the fashion and beauty industries, women’s menstrual products and litter pollution. Amy works to inform the general public regarding these environmental and health issues through public speaking. Amy fuses this information with comedy through the contents of her eco-handbag. Watch Amy’s Ocean Mic Night talk.

In her fashion work, Amy works as a Shoot Stylist and Production Assistant and offers a unique service to deliver environmentally-friendly and sustainable photoshoots. Amy is available to work on any creative shoots which focus on sustainability or with a brand who would simply like to work more sustainably. 

Within her local area of South West London, Amy volunteers for Refill, a City to Sea campaign. The campaign works with local businesses to help tackle the plastic pollution problem by encouraging the general public to refill water bottles and to drink tap water instead of buying bottled water by promoting free tap water refills. 

Amy’s favourite organisations and charities which Amy supports and follows include: Friends of the Earth, Surfers Against Sewage and City to Sea.

More about Bethan Stewart-James

My hobbies are swimming (mainly in the sea), and animals of any size or shape. I also love cycling (but broke my bike recently). Also I love playing with my dog, art and litter picking, reading and of course, theatre.

This world is so beautiful and we need to learn to appreciate it and then we can save it. 

I love going on long beautiful walks (especially if we get to see horses on the way) though I admit sometimes I get a bit moany, but deep down I really love it.

My favourite subject is probably history or languages, though I’m not in high school yet I love learning about history and what it was like before single use plastic was invented.  

One thing you need to know about me is, I’m a real book-worm, especially Harry Potter but I can’t read one book at a time for some reason, it has to be at least two.

Some of my favourite charities are the World Wide Fund for Nature, because of their positive impact on the environment and the way they make us think, and how they are devoted to saving wildlife and all of Earth’s beautiful creatures. I also love the International Fund for Animal Welfare because of their work to save all animals. A charity that is helping stop global warming and preserving wildlife is the Wildlife Trust and I love how they are planting forests that will become ancient and precious to future generations.

One thing you can do for free to help with planting more trees is change your search engine to Ecosia. It is powered by Bing and every forty searches you do online they plant a tree for you. If you are more interested in saving the seas then I have heard of Ekoru which cleans a pound of plastic for every internet search and reforests sea beds with seagrass . Another search engine is Ocean Hero which collects one bottle out of the ocean for every five searches.

So in conclusion, I’m a crazy, happy activist, that’s very dramatic, that cries when they see a dead worm and spends at least 40 minutes of their day saving individual insects from either drowning in the sea or being trodden on a path. Some people call it wasting time but I say it is saving lives.

Keep on fighting,

Bethan

Buy Your Planet Needs You!

Please purchase a hardback signed copy of Your Planet Needs You! here for £12.99 (+P&P) and receive a free special edition pack of postcards with Stu McLellan’s wonderful artwork of one of the most important endangered species in the UK, the Shrill Carder Bee, only from this website.

The Schools Manifesto

Bethan’s Eco-Schools Manifesto has 20 good ideas for organisations and institutions of any size, sign up here to adopt the Manifesto in your school or group, company or home.

Schools should do local workshops to raise awareness of world problems and fundraise for solar panels or eco school supplies. (At my school, Ysgol wdig / Goodwick Community School, this went very well and we even had some local eco heroes coming in to talk to us.)

Dylai ysgolion gynnal gweithdai lleol i godi ymwybyddiaeth o broblemau’r byd a chodi arian ar gyfer paneli solar neu gyflenwadau eco-ysgolion. (Yn fy ysgol i, Ysgol wWdig / Ysgol Gymunedol Wdig aeth hyn yn dda iawn ac roedd gennym ni hyd yn oed rai arwyr eco lleol yn dod i mewn i siarad â ni.)

Schools should grow their own foods: potatoes, leeks, tomatoes, etc.

Dylai ysgolion dyfu eu bwydydd eu hunain: tatws, cennin, tomatos, ac ati.

Schools should do litter- picks in the school grounds and public areas.

Dylai ysgolion drefnu sesiynau casglu-sbwriel ar dir yr ysgol a’r parthau cyhoeddus.

The younger kids in our school enjoyed making animal habitats such as bird homes, insect hotels, hoverfly pools, etc.

Roedd y plant iau yn ein hysgol yn mwynhau creu cynefinoedd anifeiliaid megis cartrefi adar, gwestai pryfed, pyllau pryfed hofran, ac ati

Being a vegetarian or vegan definitely makes a big difference so why not suggest a vegetarian day every week or, even better, become a vegetarian.

Mae bod yn llysieuwr neu’n figan yn bendant yn gwneud gwahaniaeth mawr , felly beth am awgrymu diwrnod llysieuol bob wythnos neu, hyd yn oed yn well, dod yn llysieuwr

In our school we have a small wild area we could expand and I think all schools should start a small one.

Yn ein hysgol ni mae gennym darn bach o dir gwyllt y gallem ei hehangu a chredaf y dylai pob ysgol greu darn o dir tebyg

In our school it is hard to give up single-use plastics but we can give it a shot.

Yn ein hysgol ni mae’n anodd rhoi’r gorau i blastigau un–ddefnydd ond gallwn ni roi cynnig go iawn arno.

I think it would make a difference to do eco assemblies to inform everyone about what you are doing as a school; you could even have some visitors coming in to talk.

Rwy’n credu y byddai’n gwneud gwahaniaeth i gynnal Gwasanaethau Ysgol Eco er mwyn hysbysu pawb am yr hyn rydych chi’n ei wneud fel ysgol; fe allech chi hyd yn oed gael rhai siaradwyr gwadd i ddod i mewn i siarad.

A good idea I got from an Eco Schools conference is to write a letter to your local MP; this is a great classroom activity.

Syniad da a gefais ar ôl bod i gynhadledd Eco-ysgolion oedd ysgrifennu llythyr at eich AS lleol; mae hwn yn weithgaredd gwych i blant ei wneud yn ystod gwers ysgol.

In 2019, my best friends, Eliza and Leila, and I started a litter picking club with the school litter- pickers. It would make a big difference if you made one too.

Yn 2019, dechreu creuodd fy ffrindiau gorau i, Eliza a Leila, a minnau hefyd, glwb casglu sbwriel gyda chasglwyr sbwriel yr ysgol. Byddai’n gwneud gwahaniaeth mawr pe byddech chi’n dechrau/creu un hefyd.

If you live close to your school, why not cycle, or walk to school; if you live far away then catch a bus.

Os ydych chi’n byw yn agos at eich ysgol, beth am feicio, neu gerdded i’r ysgol; os ydych chi’n byw ymhell i ffwrdd , yna daliwch fws

It is very important that school kids are well informed about world problems. What better way to do it than to go on ecoschool trips to places such as local companies, farms and beaches.

Mae’n bwysig iawn bod plant ysgol yn wybodus am broblemau’r byd. Pa ffordd well o wneud hynny na mynd ar deithiau eco-ysgol i leoedd fel cwmnïau lleol, ffermydd a thraethau

On warm days, instead of being inside why not go outside for outdoor classes?

Ar ddiwrnodau cynnes, yn lle bod y tu mewn , beth am fynd allan a chael gwersi yn yr awyr agored?

Starting a mini farm is such a good idea; you could have vegetables and chickens – the only thing is someone has to look after them during the holidays.

Mae creu fferm fach yn syniad mor dda; fe allech chi gael llysiau ac ieir – ond heb anghofio y bydd rhaid i rywun ofalu amdanyn nhw yn ystod y gwyliau

Plastic- free lunches and packed lunches are an awesome idea (I got this idea from an Eco-school’s conference).

Mae cinio heb blastig a chiniawau wedi’u pacio heb blastig, yn syniad anhygoel (cefais y syniad hwn pan fynychais i gynhadledd Eco-ysgol).

Another good idea is to go to school with a reusable water bottle as then the school won’t need to buy plastic cups.

Syniad da arall yw mynd i’r ysgol gyda photel ddŵr y gellir ei hailddefnyddio oherwydd felly bydd ddim angen i’r ysgol brynu cwpanau plastig.

Our school makes art out of litter instead of using new materials.

Mae ein hysgol yn gwneud celf allan o sbwriel yn lle defnyddio deunyddiau newydd.

Encourage the school to use fewer chemicals by using eco cleaning products.

Annog yr ysgol i ddefnyddio llai o gemegau trwy ddefnyddio cynhyrchion glanhau eco.

In my garden at home we have a compost bin. All schools produce so much green waste they should compost it.

Yn fy ngardd i, mae gennym fin compost. Mae pob ysgol yn cynhyrchu cymaint o wastraff gwyrdd y dylent ei gompostio.

Books swaps, clothes swaps and toys swaps at school would be very worthwhile. We do this at our school.

Byddai cyfnewid llyfrau, cyfnewid dillad a chyfnewid teganau yn yr ysgol yn werth chweil. Rydyn ni’n gwneud hyn yn ein hysgol ni yn barod.

Download the manifesto
Lawrlwytho maniffesto

FIVE TOP TIPS TO REDUCE YOUR PLASTIC USE

Amy shows you how simple daily changes can reduce your day to day plastic use

Download

SCHOOL READING GUIDE

9+ upwards including PSHE, English, Geography, Poetry and D&T with environmental questions and thoughtful discussion points

Download

BRITISH SPECIES EXTINCTION

Beautiful banner with original artwork by Stu McLellan detailing 8 major species in Britain under threat

Download

SPECIES EXTINCTION AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

Chapter from the book detailing the importance of our living world and what you can do about it.

Download

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