Natural Life Magazine

Over one-third of all known plants face extinction. Humans are the main cause of extinction and the principle threat to species at risk. Habitat loss is the leading threat, along with introduction of alien species (this can happen deliberately in the search for pretty plants for our gardens, or unintentionally by organisms “hitch-hiking” in containers, ships, cars, or soil), over-exploitation, pollution and disease, and human-induced climate change (which has many effects, from altering migratory species patterns to causing coral bleaching).

Our youngest daughter Melanie is the conservation horticulturalist in charge of the Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Through her work with native plants, I have learned about the great work done internationally on reversing this trend by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).

BGCI represents over 700 members – mostly botanic gardens – in 118 countries. It supports and is involved in the development and implementation of global policy around plant conservation – specifically the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), which it is lobbying all levels of government around the world to write into law. Individuals, businesses and non-profits can pledge their support for the GSPC by signing on at the Plants for the Planet website.

BGCI also maintains a unique PlantSearch database that allows you to search for and locate rare and threatened plant species in cultivation around the world. The database is compiled from lists of living collections submitted to BGCI by the world’s botanic gardens and includes over 575,000 records.

This is the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity, so now is a great time to learn more about the importance of plants and the ecosystem services they provide for all life on earth, and to ensure their conservation.

Natural Life Magazine has published a number of articles in the past about plant conservation and biodiversity. You can find links to some of them at our Organic Gardening article archive index. And you can read every issue as far back as 2003 by taking out a digital subscription.

 Ah, summer. It’s here in the Northern Hemisphere. The chance to lie on the dock listening to the murmur of water, or on the grass watching the clouds float across the sky. Summer vacation is our chance to do all those things we have put on hold during the routines of the rest of the year. No matter what our age or life stage, summer is full of expectations. We might dream of doing nothing, of having a grand adventure – even some romance – or just communing with Nature. Unfortunately, those lazy, hazy days of summer can prove to be more complicated than we’d like…and even downright harmful. That dock may be off-limits as the beach is closed due to bacterial pollution. Smog often blocks out any glimpse of the clouds. Hiking may be abandoned because mosquito bites can bring much more than the odd itchy bump or because we fear forest fires. Gardening is frustrating because drought conditions make you feel guilty if you water but the plants dry up if you don’t. You think twice about embarking on that family car trip because of the high cost of gasoline and the amount of air pollution it will generate. And the older you get, the hotter and stickier summer seems. Besides, once you have everybody slathered up with sun screen (and that’s after you tried to figure out which brand is most effective and still safe), outfitted with their bug suits, sunhats and sunglasses, you’re too tired to go anywhere anyway! Maybe you should just stay home and pick the dandelions that seem to be multiplying by the minute now that everybody in town has stopped using herbicides.  

But wait! It doesn’t have to be like that. Summertime can be simple and fun without exploiting Nature, damaging the environment, worrying about your family’s health and stressing you out. Whether you’re staying home this summer, hiking in the wild, visiting the lake or a big city, our archives is full of ideas and inspiration for having a healthy, energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly summer. So pull up the hammock, pour yourself a glass of iced tea, settle back and explore the possibilities.

• Have a Sustainable, Healthy Summer
• Safely Protecting From Sun and Insects
• The High (Environmental) Cost of Playing Golf
• Plan a Green Vacation
• Respectful Whate Watching
• Home-grown Kids:  Cultivating a Love of Gardening
• We Eat Weeds
• Watermelon Recipes
• Barbequing Veggie-Style
• Summer Salad Recipes

There are lots more articles about enjoying your summer in a healthy, natural way in back issues of Natural Life Magazine. You can access them all with an inexpensive subscription to our digital edition.

Our food supply – not to mention farming and the environment – just got safer in North America. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced a ban on the pesticide endosulfan – one of the last legal organochlorine pesticides, a notorious group, of which DDT is a member.

According to the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), endosulfan is a persistent, toxic pesticide that travels long distances and impacts communities far away from the place of application. It is used on various crops worldwide, but its largest uses are on cotton, tea, and coffee. An article in Environmental Health News lists melons, cucumbers, squashes, potatoes, apples, blueberries, eggplant, lettuce, and other leafy vegetables, pears, peppers, and stone fruit as crops on which it is also used.

Endosulfan is extremely toxic (some say more so than DDT) and has been banned in the European Union since 2007. Tests on lab animals have indicated that it is toxic to the nervous system and can damage the kidney, liver, and male reproductive organs. Since it is a wide spectrum insecticide, not associated with any particular insect, many non-target species, including humans, also get harmed by its use.

For over a decade, environment and health groups, as well as farm worker advocates, have been fighting to get endosulfan banned. It has been restricted in the US and Canada, but has remained in common use, especially on Florida tomatoes and California and Nevada cotton, according to PAN. It is also still in use in countries like Australia and India. Environmental Health News quotes a 2009 study by British and Canadian researchers that says that, unlike most other organochlorines, which were banned in the 1970s, its concentrations have been increasing in the Arctic and in other remote ecosystems.

Of course, the way to avoid ingesting these toxic pesticides is to grow your own, or purchase only certified organic. But sometimes, that’s easier said than done. If you aren’t able to grow your own organic produce, and can’t afford to buy 100 percent organic – or can’t always locate what you want in a pesticide-free version – here is a guide from Natural Life Magazine that will help you stretch your organic food dollar.

In the wake of the horrendous and frighteningly ongoing BP oil spill are coming calls to boycott BP. As I write this, a Facebook page for that purpose has close to 600,000 fans and if you plug “boycott BP” into Google, you get almost one million results. It’s understandable that people are looking for someone to blame for this ecological disaster, and boycotts are popular, and sometimes effective, ways for consumers to get a message to a company about their dissatisfaction. However, why not boycott Exxon Mobil Corp., which still hasn’t paid damages to victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill? Or why about Royal Dutch/Shell, which is involved in the civil war in the Niger Delta? Or Chevron Corp., which I’m told is trying to suppress a documentary about oil-waste damage in Ecuador? Or maybe we should just boycott them all!

Removing petroleum from our lives would, of course, be very difficult, if not impossible. But, we need to move in that direction. As columnist Daniel Gross, writing at Slate last weekend, pointed out, rather than drilling deeper or finding new ways to liberate oil from the sand or rocks, “we should apply our collective engineering smarts to figuring out ways to use less energy.”

And the path to using less energy doesn’t require just engineering smarts. Individuals can play an immediate role. Do we really need to fly half way around the world for a vacation? Do twenty world leaders and their thousands of buddies really need to converge on Toronto for a photo op later this month? Do we really need to jump in the car to go to the corner store? Natural Life Magazine readers are at the forefront of the move to use fewer hydrocarbons. And the cover feature in our upcoming July/August issue provides great advice about how to replace four wheels with two. Let’s make that a beginning….

Some of the articles in Natural Life Magazine’s archives that are accessed the most are those that provide information about native plants. These include this one about growing wildflowers, this one about growing a downspout bog garden, and this one about luring beneficial insects with native plants.

Native plants are those which are indigenous or naturalized to a given area. Some native plants have adapted to limited, unusual environments, to very harsh climates, or to exceptional soil conditions. They form a plant community where other species have developed to support them. For instance, a certain insect could pollinate the plant and that insect, in turn, exists because it relies on the pollen from the plant as a source of food. Some native plants rely on natural conditions, such as occasional wildfires, to release their seeds or to provide a fertile environment where their seedlings can become established.

Gardeners and farmers like to move plants to new locations for cultivation as crops or as ornamentals (or transport them by accident). And some of those plants may become what we call invasive species, damaging the local ecology by choking out native plants and interrupting the balance of Nature that depends upon them.

Government agencies and environmental groups are directing increasing resources to addressing these species and their potential interactions with climate change. Gardeners can also help preserve the ecological balance by planting native plants and avoiding species that are locally invasive. There are also opportunities to be a “citizen scientist” and help researchers learn more about these invasive species. One such program is underway this summer, as a group of scientists gathers data about invasive garlic mustard. More information about the project and how to get involved is available on the Global Garlic Mustard Field Survey website.

Some Natural Life Magazine readers may have noticed that whenever we use the word “Nature” meaning universe in which we live, and all its living and non-living things, we capitalize the letter “N.” So I thought I’d let you know why we do that.

Back in 2004, I heard from Chris Adam,  the Executive Director of the Earthvalues Institute asking for our endorsement for their “Putting the capital N back in Nature” campaign. As a writer and editor, I strongly believe in the power of words to make change.  So I was interested to learn that in the 1700s, Nature would have been spelled with an upper case N. But sometime during the Industrial Revolution – the same time that Nature began to take a back seat – that convention was lost. So we agreed with the Earthvalues Institute’s initiative as a way to highlight the need to take the earth and its riches into consideration when making individual and political decisions.

May 8 is World Fair Trade Day, a celebration of a movement that responds to poverty, economic and global food crises, and climate change.

In today’s world, increasing numbers of people are beginning to agree with what Natural Life Magazine has been based on since 1976: that we are all connected and the world’s various problems are interconnected…and that there can be no sustainability without solving all of the issues. That means there can be no economic justice without solving climate problems, that our health is connected to the way we treat the environment and how businesses operate, and so on. The Fair Trade movement has been working for a couple of decades now on a solution to these problems. Its main principle is to create markets that value the people who make the food we eat and the goods we use. It combines social justice with an alternative business model and a system of global commerce, and is also a tool for international development.

Farmers, artisans, and other low income workers in over eighty countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America now make scores of products under contract with Fair Trade organizations and companies adhering to Fair Trade principles. The most common are coffee, sugar, cocoa, chocolate, bananas, tea, jewelry, clothing, and housewares. Others include cut flowers, toys, furniture, art, sports balls, wine, olive oil, rice, spices, and herbs. These Fair Trade producers benefit in many ways from favorable financing, long-term relationships with buyers, minimum prices, community investment, capacity building, and sustainable environmental standards. Participants often credit Fair Trade for helping them eat adequately, access health care, send kids to school, clean their water, care for orphans or disabled people, and manage sustainable businesses.

There are a number of definitions of Fair Trade, a number of certifiers, and no single, regulatory body. That means that, like the words “organic,” “natural,” and “eco,” the term “Fair Trade” is not always what it seems. You can find information about how to recognize genuine Fair Trade products at the website of the Fair Trade Resource Network.

An international coalition of Fair Trade organizations has agreed on this definition: “Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers – especially in the South. Fair Trade Organizations, backed by consumers, are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade.”

On May 8 – and in this coming week leading up to Fair Trade Day – communities around the world will be hosting information sessions, conference, food tastings, Frisbee tournaments, fashion shows, trade fairs, markets, film screenings, book launches, and much more. So it’s a great time to learn more about this important step towards global sustainability.

In 1997, I received an article query for Natural Life Magazine from a killer whale researcher named Alexandra Morton who had, 14 years earlier, moved to a cluster of islands on Canada’s west coast called the Broughton Archipelago, which is the perfect place to study whales year round. Her research broke new ground as she spent her life watching orca as they slept, foraged and played. But she had recently discovered a problem: The exploding number of fish farms – and the problems they have caused with sea lice and other issues – was causing her beloved whales to disappear. As she put it, “Wild salmon populations crashed and the pristine waters of the Broughton Archipelago turned red. Another ecosystem was dying.” The articles was entitled “Whales Don’t Eat Farmed Salmon…Why Should We?” It was among the first articles published on the problems with farmed salmon.

Ever since, Alexandra Morton has been working against the floating pen fish farms and trying to move the industry into closed tanks. BC scientists have produced over 20 scientific papers on the impact of salmon farms, to no avail. In fact, they’re still trying to enlarge the industry and 90 percent of the 2009 sockeye that were exposed to salmon farms vanished. So now, she is spearheading the Get Out Migration as the logical next step in an effort to remove the impact of salmon farms on wild fish and ecosystems by removing salmon farms from BC waters. Morton and others are walking down the B.C. coast this week from the fishing village of Sointula to the province’s capital in Victoria, organizing a blessing for the wild fry on Mother’s Day, then meeting with politicians who support their position that the era of net pen fish farming is over for BC.

Like the salmon migration, success depends on numbers. Details are at the Wild Salmon Are Sacred website. If you can’t particpate in the walk, the least you can do is to sign the petition on the website, avoid farmed salmon and support the wild salmon economy.

A lot of people have wished me “Happy Earth Day™” today. But I’m not feeling like it’s an occasion for celebration. Back in the early days – in the 1970s when we started publishing Natural Life Magazine – there was a heady sense of power to make change, and to set aside one day a year to remind ourselves to work on solving ecological problems.

But now, the problems loom much larger. And they’re global in scope. While we used to think in terms of saving some lakes, cleaning up a river, conserving a specific species of animal, banning a pesticide, we now have a full-blown biodiversity crisis, global climate change and many other issues that have become apparent as a result of having stretched ecological systems to the breaking point. However, politicians and corporate leaders alike are not coming up with real solutions. In fact, instead of solving the problems, in many cases, we’re continuing the behavior that has caused the problems. And that means we’re falling behind, in spite of taking a day each year for the past forty years to plant some trees and wish each other “Happy Earth Day™.” The leader of the band, in Canada at least, has brought along a motley crew of corporate sponsors, including car manufacturers, energy producers, insurance companies, electronics manufacturers and grocery stores. 

I do believe we can change the course of events, although some things are already too far gone and life undoubtedly will be different for our children and grandchildren. If we are to save this planet for human life, governments and corporations will have to act quickly and decisively. And individuals like you and I will have to push them to act. While we’re doing that, we’ll need to be sure our own lifestyle is sustainable (and doesn’t include buying all the so-called green living trinkets I’ve had pitched to me in honor of the day.) As Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world.

So if you’re marking Earth Day™ in any way, please include some time for sober thought about how we can dig ourselves out of the monstrous mess we’ve created. And then, let’s get started.

We were interested to see the venerable Economist magazine write about straw bale houses earlier this month. When such a conservative, mainstream publication notices a trend – albeit a decade or two late – that can only mean the trend has become firmly entrenched in our culture. So we welcome this article, even though it’s belated and somewhat uninformed.

Straw bale construction has, indeed, experienced a renaissance and has become popular with people looking to build strong, relatively inexpensive, ecologically sound houses and other structures using local, renewable materials. The material is very low in embodied energy, cheaply produced, non-toxic, and biodegradable at the end of its lifetime. Straw is an abundant, annually renewable resource often treated as waste by farmers. Well-constructed straw bale homes are durable, with some having survived for hundreds of years. They can also be very attractive because the materials lend themselves to rounded corners and other shapes.

Natural Life Magazine has been covering straw bale construction for almost 20 years now. Here’s the earliest straw bale article that we have archived on the website. In 1996, we held a two-day straw bale construction workshop as part of the Natural Life Festival. Ottawa-based architect and straw bale specialist Linda Chapman and her group of enthusiastic students built a small structure in the backyard of our rural home/office. One of Linda’s designs was featured on the cover of our May/June 2000. Linda and her partner, through their company Fibrehouse Limited, have been researching and building with straw bales since the early 1990s. With the help of CMHC, they have tested 18-inch wide stuccoed straw bale walls and found them to be sturdy under extreme stress.

A list of some of the articles we’ve published in Natural Life Magazine on straw bale, straw clay and other types of sustainable construction is here.

Linda Chapman’s website has a great deal of useful information, as well as a gallery of straw bale homes.

And last, but not least, the International Straw Bale Registry Project has almost 1,500 straw bale buildings on its site.