The recent recall of hundreds of thousands of eggs and the illness of over a thousand people due to salmonella contamination is a wake-up call to the dangers of factory farming. And it’s bound to encourage more people to buy organic eggs from local farmers, or to keep their own backyard chickens.
Electronic gadgets, as well as high tension power lines, generate electromagnetic fields that researchers are finding to be harmful to health. Children are particularly at risk and one group of parents wants Wi-Fi removed from their children’s elementary school because the kids have been suffering ill-effects that go away on weekends and during the summer.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the descriptive label given to an ever-increasing number of children – especially boys – who have trouble fitting into the school system and disrupt family life. Complaints about their behavioral “problems” include hyperactivity, poor attention span, lack of concentration, disruptiveness, clumsiness, recklessness, defiance, and irritability. As I wrote in [...]
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). A variety of organizations are working to reverse this trend, including BGCI, an international organization of botanic gardens.
Summertime can be simple and fun without exploiting Nature, damaging the environment, worrying about your family’s health and stressing you out. Here are some articles from Natural Life Magazine’s archives to help.
Our food supply – not to mention farming and the environment – just got a bit 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.
We can boycott BP, but should also consider the other “bad boy” oil companies, and oil in general. Natural Life provides one way for individuals to begin.
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.
The Fair Trade movement’s 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. That will be celebrated and share on May 8, which is International Fair Trade Day.
Whale researcher Alexandra Morton has organized a walk down the British Columbia coast in support of wild salmon and in an attempt to get the government to outlaw penned salmon farms from B.C. waters.