Some parts of Earth are getting overloaded and tired. Mother Earth needs help from some babysitters to take care of her children. If you have a cat, you know there is litter box to take care of, or else a corner in the barn that needs to be cleaned out once in a while. The time has come, there needs to be some caretaking, some cleaning up after human activity in our world. If Mother Earth is tired, who will carry and sustain us? There has been enough human activity, especially the use of fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - to have a dramatic impact on the overall balance for life on Earth. Other sources of energy are available. Of course, population has increased but the increase in energy use is way beyond this. Everything we do, every activity, takes energy. Every time energy is used, there is some leftover, a footprint, some waste. (This is about energy. There are many other environmental impacts resulting from human activity.) Fossil fuels came into large-scale use in the I

Our human bodies are incredible in so many ways. Among other things there is an average body temperature of 37 C or 98.6 F   When this changes, something may be wrong and out of balance. Average Earth temperature now is 12.7 degrees C. Thousands of measurements are used for this. Beginning in the 1880’s, there were enough weather measurements to begin recording global averages. From 1880 to 1980, average global temperature increased by approximately one degree; that is one tenth of a degree per decade. Since 1980, the rate of temperature increase has more than doubled. These numbers are the baseline when there is talk of a temperature increase of 1 or 1.5 or 2 degrees. These “small” changes are huge and important for our climate and environment. Climate is our local weather - hot year, cool year, wet year, dry year, winds, seasons. Climate is also about global weather patterns. Climate change is huge and complicated and very important, It is like a large ship on the ocean. It takes a l

Imagine this for a moment: every material object you own—the contents of your house, your garage, your storage locker, your cottage—is connected to you by an invisible cord. Those cords represent the energy flowing outward from you to all of these things; the energy of upkeep, of financial expense, of perhaps simply the hum of low-grade unease that you have all these things that you are not using, that are just taking up space for the most part. A few years ago, my husband and I discovered the film Minimalism on Netflix, about two young men promoting the joy of living a life free of “stuff.” Having moved our household thirteen times—a prospect that became a bigger ordeal as the years went on and our family grew— Joel and I marveled at, and frankly envied, the nimbleness with which these two young men moved through life. The film sparked in us a desire to have more of that agility and ease in life.  How much energy is leaking from each of us outward to the things that clutter up our ho

Have you ever taken note of the sources of our food at the grocery store?  Have you thought about what all is included in the price of that can of pineapple or peaches or even the pinto beans and tomatoes? It might surprise you to find that many of the common foods we enjoy and can be grown locally are actually grown and packaged in distant lands, and that the cost of storage and travel is a large part of the price we pay. Does that matter to us? Do we care about how these imported foods were raised? Do we know whether their nutritional value compares favourably with what is produced locally? What about the chemicals used? Or the working conditions and wages of the farm labourers? In the past, our parents did not have access to strawberries or fresh tomatoes in January. For those of us with a rural upbringing, fresh fruits and vegetables in January or food out of a tin were not on the daily menu. Almost everything we ate was sourced in our back yards or from friends and neighbours. We