Hi! Long time no see!
I just had to jot a quick post about this cross-Canada run with which my friend Sarah Powell is involved.
Her friend Colin is running from coast to coast to raise awareness and money for the organization ‘Take me Outside.” http://takemeoutside.ca/
On a related note, I am reading the book “Last Child in the Woods- saving our children from nature deficit disorder.” Let me quote you a few thought provoking passages-
p.75 The Eighth Intelligence ”Janet and Julia also invented nature games. As they wandered through the woods they would listen for ‘the sounds they could not hear.’
Janet called this game the sound of a creature not stirring.
A list might include:
sap rising, snowflakes forming and falling, sunrise, moonrise, dew on the grass, a seed germinating, an earthworm moving through the soil, cactus baking in the sun, mitosis, an apple ripening, feathers, wood petrifying, a tooth decaying
p.133 Explaining Ecophobia “David Sobel says, ‘If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering a subtle form of dissociation. In our zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s problems, we cut our children off from their roots.’ Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder. He offers this analogy of dissociation: In response to physical and sexual abuse children learn to cut themselves off from pain. Emotionally they turn off. ’My fear is that … the natural world is being abused and they just don’t want to have to deal with it.”
…
“Children learn about the rainforest, but usually not about their own region’s forests…it’s hard enough for children to understand the life cycles of chipmunks and milkweed, organisms they can study close at hand.’”
For all of human history until about 200 years ago, our atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Parts per million is simply a way of measuring the concentration of different gases, and means the ratio of the number of carbon dioxide molecules to all of the molecules in the atmosphere. 275 ppm CO2 is a useful amount—without some CO2 and other greenhouse gases that trap heat in our atmosphere, our planet would be too cold for humans to inhabit.
