“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.” ~William Blake
Trees are known as the lungs of the our planet. As well as mitigating climate change, they provide shelter for wildlife, shade our homes and public spaces, provide us with enlightenment and inspiration, and are even a great place to perch a house.
Here’s an article from Natural Life Magazine’s archives with more about “The Wonderful World of Trees and Treehugging.”
The March/April 2013 issue of Natural Life Magazine will be sent to subscribers over the next few days. Here’s the table of contents.
This issue features an important article by American journalist Richard Schiffman. “The Five Stages of Environmental Grief” explores how working through our feelings about the state of the Earth could help us move on to adjusting and adapting to problems like climate change – if not actually solving them.
Virtually everything we’ve published in this magazine since 1976 has been about how to solve those problems with our own actions, by living more lightly on our planet. But the world’s citizens, corporations, and governments have often been at cross purposes about that, and now, many experts say that we may have moved past the point of no return. So we are probably into a phase of adjustment and adaptation, like it or not.
Working with a concept that originated with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who wrote about dealing with death and dying, Schiffman calls this the fifth and final stage – the stage of acceptance, which could enable action. He writes that this is when “the game is over,” meaning that we are no longer fighting against the truth of what is taking place, not wasting our energy in guilt or anger, not just trying superficially to fix things. Instead, he says, “we have moved beyond both hope and despair to a clear-eyed vision of reality.”
I hope he’s right, because that will mean that we can finally start to do things on a large enough scale to make a difference. Of course, that “we” means you and I, since governments don’t seem to be doing much leading and few corporations will clean up their acts without being forced to, either by consumer action or government regulation.
Natural Life Magazine is unique among the current crop of green living magazines and websites because we’re all about connections, about how the various topics we cover are interwoven into the tapestry of life: parenting, health, economy, leisure, work, education, housing.
Those interconnections are why I always chuckle when a new public opinion poll proclaims that people have changed their top priorities from, for instance, the environment to health care, as I heard this past week. The solutions to problems in these areas are inevitably linked, as we often illustrate in Natural Life. Although that would seem obvious, it’s not always so for many people.
Cancer, with its myriad environmental causes, is a good illustration of that connection. And it comes to mind because this is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. On my personal blog, I’ve written about what I dubbed “pinkwashing.” Pinkwashing is an extensionof “greenwashing” - used to describe the activities of companies that position themselves as leaders in the struggle to eradicate breast cancer while engaging in practices that may be contributing to the disease. Those practices include using a variety of carcinogens in their products and/or polluting our air, water, and soil with carcinogens that are by-products of the manufacturing process. The cosmetic industry, which supports breast cancer organizations as a way of marketing its products, is one example, but there are many others. The result is that people get sick and our environment gets polluted while corporate shareholders get rich. And if we made these companies clean up their acts, fewer people would get sick and less money would be spent on health care.
So it’s hard to justify a greater sense of urgency over fixing problems with either one of the environment, health care, or the economy. Even though environmental issues seem remote and therefore not urgent, while health care and jobs seem to affect us on a more immediate level, their solutions are interconnected. As Thoreau said, “What is the use of a house if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on?”