EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

A recent BBC story by Mark Easton called “Selfish Adults ‘Damage Childhood’” piqued my interest, especially when it cited too much competition in education as a key reason. Easton summarized a three-year study by the Children’s Society called “The Good Childhood Inquiry” in which the panel concluded that children’s lives in Britain have become “more difficult than in the past.” It cited “family break-up, unprincipled advertising, too much competition in education and income inequality” as key reasons. The report also says that individual freedom and self-determination have been good for society, but that too much of this can lead to the decline of emotional health in children. Read on...

The Supreme Court’s recent decision, that corporations can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns, has many Americans wondering about the integrity of our democracy. President Obama cautioned in his State of the Union address that this ruling—known as “Citizens United”—is “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health-insurance companies and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” Read on…

One spring day a couple of years ago, I noticed an unusual gray haze screening Santa Fe’s typically unspoiled skies. It could not be attributed to wood fires that many residents use to heat their homes in colder months. I looked at the weather satellite maps; there was no system moving our way. I later learned that a dust cloud from Mongolia had parked itself over northern New Mexico. Read on…

Prairie dogs are the eyes of the community.
- Terry Tempest Williams

Groundhog Day is most famously celebrated in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where almost always, Phil retreats, forecasting six more weeks of winter. But it is west of the Mississippi where Phil’s cousins, the prairie dogs, may well be offering a more dire prediction—about the fate of humanity. This is why there have been efforts to establish Prairie-Dog Day to bring attention to the plight of these creatures, under attack by ranchers and developers who consider them pests. Read on…

Lodu leads his visitors to the top of his temple and sacred god—Niam Raja, as he calls this mountain—and hangs his axe head over his sinuous, copper-skinned shoulder. They peer through a break in the dense foliage of the Niyamgiri forest to the valley floor below. It is bereft of vegetation. Splayed out over a red, dusty wasteland is an imposing, smoke-stacked bauxite processing plant, where raw material is converted into a sodium alumina liquor using caustic soda, lime and steam. Once separated from the water, this is smelted into aluminum. The resulting turquoise solution is captured in holding ponds, where it seeps into the ground. The plant is the property of Vedanta Resources, a British mining company. Read on…