Little Miss Figgy Withit is having a growth spurt. At 6″ tall at the tip of her one and only leaf when she arrived in our mailbox, she shrunk a little within a few days. The leaf, dry and crisp, fell, and suddenly our little fig tree was bare. A sign of hope, however: one tiny green nodule about halfway up. And within a day, another where the leave once was. Less than one week…
When environment activism took root in the 70s, one framework it created was the Three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Those three words and the iconic three-arrow symbol became ubiquitous and contributed to a cultural shift. Albeit in the reverse order of what was presented. Folks focused on recycle and often skipped the first two. To be clear, it isn’t that recycling and reusing didn’t exist prior to the 70s. The ethos of repairing and repurposing has always…
One of the mental fallacies I’ve worked on reframing has been the idea that every change I make must be all or nothing. I’m either sedentary or I’m walking for 30 minutes every single day. Eating fast food or cooking wholesome healthy meals three times a day. Not drinking any water or drinking some complicated formula’s worth of ounces each day. This approach has never worked for me. Not once. And I tried for decades.…
There’s a meme going around that nails how many of us feel about practically everything happening in the world right now, especially the climate crisis: One of the problems this creates is that it’s hard to get traction when you’re vacillating wildly between hope and nihilism. It’s exhausting. For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out a way forward. One that creates a sense of hope that’s rooted in action, awareness, and understanding.…