Monthly Archives: June 2010

Summertime, and the Livin’ is Green

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 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.

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.

Toxic Pesticide Banned in US

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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.

Can We Boycott Oil?

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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….