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.
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.
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.
Celebrating Earth Day is not appropriate. And it’s too late for symbolism. Instead, we need to push governments and corporations to make serious and drastic change in order that Earth continues to be habitable by humans.
Symbols like Earth Hour and Earth Day are great. But it will take more than people turning off their lights for an hour a year or school kids planting trees one day a year to create that change. What are you doing about climate change today?
A preview of Natural Life Magazine’s May/June 2010 cover and table of contents.
People around the world are deciding that excess is never good for individuals, communities, countries and the Planet…and are evolving an instinct that says ‘enough’.
Education is one of the topics that we regularly cover in Natural Life Magazine. That’s because we believe that making changes to how we treat and educate our children is crucial to the act of building a truly sustainable society. One of our most revered and supposedly democratic institutions uses the tool of compulsion to [...]