Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day, in which all bloggers are encouraged to post about the environment in their own way.

So, here are my thoughts on why playing the ukulele is good for the environment. Feel free to add your own in the comments section.

The carbon footprint of a uke versus, say a guitar, is tiny:

• Less wood needed to build (and creative luthiers are working with sustainable materials like bamboo, or recycled materials like lunchboxes)
• Four strings versus 6 (or 24 or 33!)
• Far less metal to smelt to make frets (wow!)
  
• Uke music takes fewer trees to publish, owing to the diminutive size of the chord diagrams
• Less frequently electrically amplified (much to the delight of my wife and kids)
• And, finally, the most painfully obvious: less fossil fuel used driving from gig to gig (owing to the infrequent occurrence of the latter)

Sad to admit, however, perhaps the greenest instruments are those made and played by the First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra:

"The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra blows carved-out carrots, taps turnips, claps with eggplant cymbals, twangs on rhubarb fibers, and rustles parsley and greens, all in the creation of an experimental sound that eventually winds up -- literally -- in the audience's stomach...

"...The instruments are made from scratch just one hour prior to each performance using the freshest vegetables available, then all ninety pounds of vegetables are cooked into a soup following the performance."

Great stuff! But leek-zucchini-vibrators?