EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

Jeffrey Hollender’s title is Chief Inspired Protagonist, or CIP. He is cofounder of Seventh Generation, one of North America’s most trusted brands of environmentally and socially responsible household products. But the products that occupy half an isle of shelving in every natural grocery in the US and Canada are actually the offspring of a line of energy-conservation products once available only from Jeffrey’s mail-order catalog, Renew America. Seventh Generation is now the leading and fastest-growing brand of natural products for the home, and the leading authority on issues related to making a positive difference in the health of the planet and its inhabitants through our everyday choices. Read on…

[Today is World Oceans Day - Ed.] Wallace “J.” Nichols has an inordinate fondness for sea turtles. His Ph.D. dissertation was on the “Biology and Conservation of Sea Turtles in Baja California, Mexico.” In 1998 he founded Grupo Tortuguero, an international grassroots movement dedicated to restoring Pacific sea turtles and to sustainable management of ocean fisheries. In 1999 he co-founded WiLDCOAST, an international conservation team dedicated to the protection of coastal wilderness where he and a diverse group of partners organized fishermen to protect endangered sea turtles and helped coastal ranchers protect their shores for future generations. Read on…

We might feel like we’re a world away from Africa, but that doesn’t stop our carbon emissions from polluting that continent and raising the temperature of the planet as a whole. Poverty-stricken Africans find it hard to survive as it is, without our emissions increasing floods and droughts. Someone had to take a stand; Kenya’s Wangari Maathai would not take it lying down. Read on…

Who better to spur youth into action against climate change than youngsters themselves? Talk about positive peer pressure: Inspired by Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, 12-year-old Alec Loorz of Ventura, California, set up Kids vs. Global Warming, “a group of kids who educate other kids about the science of global warming and empower them to take action.” Read on…

In Native thought, dreaming or “visioning” is the first step to realizing a goal. And as native traditions have continuously viewed our human existence through the lens of whole systems, it is customary to confer with Mother Earth before carrying out a plan. Ohki Siminé Forest, a spiritual teacher living among the indigenous Maya in Chiapas, Mexico, since 1985, refers to this careful thought as “Earth Medicine Ways.” Read on…