Do you ever wonder if you could make the world a better place?

Here are ten small things we can all do to make the world a better place without having to join the missions or fork out on monthly donations;

1)      Plant a Tree in your back Garden.

The world is a very simple place and if you want to keep it green you should start on your doorstep. Trees are a natural habitat for wildlife and help absorb carbon dioxide (a tree can absorb up to a ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime). Trees provide shelter and food for wildlife such as birds, squirrels and bugs. If you don’t have space for a tree, or if you want to maximise the benefit your garden can make, you should plant flowers that attract and feed pollinators like bees, butterflies, and birds: they’re disappearing at an alarming rate because of pesticide and insecticide use.

2)      Donate Blood

Want to save someone’s life? People in accidents, undergoing treatment, and even premature infants all need your help to survive. Just by donating blood once you’ve helped someone and this means you’ve made the world a better place. Currently only 1 in 30 people give blood, but 1 in 3 people will need blood in their lifetime, that doesn’t make sense now does it?

3)      Don’t Smoke

First of all smoking gives you cancer and you die, and if you’re reading this it means you care, so you’re one of the good people, Jack Johnson is potentially looking for you, and we need you to stick around. Smoking creates a drain on the health service because of the huge cost in treating smoking related disease & cancer. For example in the UK treating disease directly caused by smoking costs more than £5bn a year. This has a negative effect on the economy which impacts on the government’s ability to provide social services and support the community at large. But don’t just discourage smoking, take it a step further, support anti tobacco legislation and help rid the world of a problem that The World Health Organisation calculates as being responsible for 27% of deaths among men and around one in 10 among women.

4)      Become an Organ Donor.

Listen people, you don't need your organs when you die, someone else does. If you want to make the world a better place save someone’s life on the way out, when you’re done you’re done.

5)      Stop Driving Everywhere

We all know vehicle emissions are bad for the planet. If it’s a short journey just walk or cycle. Get to work by using public transport or car pool. If you need to use a car, consider purchasing a hybrid or an electric model. We can make a difference if we try. Individually we can become community leaders and collectively we can become global leaders in energy conservation.  

6)      Recycle.

Let’s reduce landfill waste. These days just about anything can be recycled—from newspapers and plastic, to computers and old mobile phones. Make sure your workplace has recycling facilities and ensure you buy recycled products whenever you can.

7)      Be Politically Aware

If you want the world to be a better place hold your politicians accountable for their actions. Vote for candidates who uphold your beliefs and voice your support for them amongst your friends and community. Read a newspaper, be aware of what’s happening in the world around you, aim to understand global politics.

8)      Adopt Ethical Practices when you shop.

Support companies that have fair trade practices, don’t let big business dictate terms over farmers and producers. Remember some companies use sweat shops to produce the clothes you wear, be conscious of the goods you buy. By purchasing products from countries which don’t respect basic human rights you are supporting their government and helping enslave people. If you’re not happy about the way a foreign government acts don’t visit that country, don’t buy their products. Boycotting an economy will put it under pressure. Remember to help reduce carbon output by purchasing energy efficient electronic appliances.

9)      Go Vegetarian at least once a week.

Meat based products are so readily accessible nowadays that we’ve completely forgotten how it is produced. Despite any moral implications of the mass genocide of animal life on this planet there are huge implications to the over industrialisation of  meat supply to our planets well being. For example: It requires 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. The international meat industry generates roughly 18% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions—even more than transportation—according to a report last year from the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of that comes from the nitrous oxide in manure and the methane from the natural result of bovine digestion. Methane has a warming effect that is 23 times as great as that of carbon, while nitrous oxide is 296 times as great. If you switch to vegetarianism, you can shrink your carbon footprint by up to 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year.

10)   Give your Children the right Education

Let’s look at what our children learn in school, are we giving them the right education? If you can, give them every opportunity to learn, teach your child an instrument, a foreign language, good ethical behaviour, instil in them a sense of responsibility to take care of this planet and everyone on it.  

The first rule to Elf on the Shelf is that you do not talk about Elf on the Shelf, or something along those lines.

For those of you not familiar with this festive sensation, Elf on the Shelf is basically a very creepy looking puppet doll that parents have started to use in the build up to Christmas, primarily as a discipline tool to make sure their children don’t misbehave, but also to have some cheap laughs with relatives at how gullible their young minds are, and like all pop up parents – use the doll to find new ways at mentally scaring their children for life.

The official website explains; Elf on the Shelf is a special scout elf sent from the North Pole to help Santa Claus manage his naughty and nice lists. When a family adopts a scout elf and gives it a name, the scout elf receives its Christmas magic and can fly to the North Pole each night to tell Santa Claus about all of the day's adventures. Each morning, the scout elf returns to its family and perches in a different place to watch the fun. Children love to wake up and race around the house looking for their scout elf each morning. There are two simple rules that every child knows when it comes to having a scout elf. First, a scout elf cannot be touched; Christmas magic is very fragile and if a scout elf is touched it may lose that magic and be unable to fly back to the North Pole. Second, a scout elf cannot speak or move while anyone in the house is awake! A scout elf's job is to watch and listen.

Now I have one simple rule on how children should be raised, and that’s to treat them with the same respect you would treat an adult, to allow them to develop their own unique personality whilst building strong communication and interpersonal skills.

After all what would you think if your wife came home after work one day and put a voodoo doll on the table, turned to you and said;

‘from now on if you don’t get the bins out on time this dolls gonna f*ck you up’

That would be a pretty messed up situation, first of all you would think, have you just gone mental, why is there a witch doll on the table, and secondly you would think ‘honey we need to have a little talk’.

Now I’m not saying cancel Christmas, if you want to deceive your children that’s fine, I’m sure there’s no harm in filling your child with blatant lies which will eventually unravel resulting in latent feelings of mistrust as they develop into young adults.

The truth is the imagination of children brings Christmas to life; there is a well known secret that if there were no children there would be no Santa. I do believe that children need to be afforded every opportunity that makes them happy and it may be healthy to encourage the possibilities their developing minds are capable of, but I also believe we have a responsibility as adults to manage their expectations and to ensure we are not introducing wild misconceptions that may stunt their understanding of how the world works. As much as introducing the possibility of magic to your children might seem like a wonderful thing I believe placing your child under house arrest at the hands of some creepy elf results in your child living in the shadow of fear, constantly concerned about what the elf knows, maybe it can read their thoughts as well, constantly watched, constantly in fear of doing something bad, basically introducing your child to some dark Orwellian nightmare that no human being should be subject to.

If this kind of treatment was used in Guantanamo there would be outrage. Maybe do your child a favour and keep that creepy elf off of the shelf, or at least think a little bit about how they think and feel before you decide to abuse their open minds for your own amusement.