Tag Archives: clean air

And We’ve Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden

This garden we are graced to live in, this magical spinning planet we call home, was designed for abundance, designed to provide us with food, clothing and shelter, and, beyond that, beauty and magic. This garden was not designed to withstand the amount of carbon dioxide and methane we are putting into the atmosphere from fossil fuels; the pesticides we are putting into our water, soil and food; the destruction of our trees and oceans meant to clean our air and create oxygen.

We have forgotten where we live. We have forgotten that being alive is not something we are guaranteed.

We are forgetting our moral obligation to our children and future generations.

Claire and berries

Stop the Frack Attack!

Hydraulic fracturing a.k.a. fracking is the current form of natural gas extraction that is sweeping the nation and the globe.  It’s beyond toxic, poisoning people, ecosystems, our precious water supply and the air we breathe. Yet the gas industry has all the money it takes to drill away, passing on drilling’s heaviest costs to landowners, local communities and future generations. There are even legal gag orders on doctors in Pennsylvania and Ohio that prevent them from revealing to patients the specific chemicals showing up in their bodies as a result of fracking.  Enough is enough!

The Stop the Frack Attack rally and march in DC is happening on Saturday, July 28th, 2012.  It will be bursting with good people who want a safe and promising future for all.  Let your voices be heard over the sound of the mighty dollar that has bought our elected officials.  All rally details can be found at stopthefrackattack.org.

Here’s Barbie’s latest anti-frack rap, “Hit the Road, Frack.”  She’s had it, too…

Poisoned Water, Poisoned Air and Other Scary Monsters

My daughter Claire says she has a lot of monsters that live under her bed. They include vampires, zombies, giant furry things, etc. They are her friends, and only she is allowed to visit them. One day, after talking about her monster friends, Claire asked what really scares me. I think she was hoping I’d come up with something that has glowing red eyes, long crusty fingernails, green fangs and a hair-raising howl. Pondering her question, I stared out into space, letting all the monsters that haunt me race through my head.

Cancer, cancer, cancer, I thought; that everywhere-you-turn monster that’s consuming humans at a frightening pace. Cancer scares me. What scares me even more is the constant poisoning of our water, air, soil and food. Modern industrial life has brought with it a plethora of toxic chemicals that have saturated our society.

Continue reading

Air

I’m not quite sure when it first began, but somewhere around the time when my daughter Claire was in pre-K we began a ritual of saying good morning to the sky as we drove to school. There’s this overpass we come to that presents a wonderful, wide-open view of the sky. From this viewpoint we can see big white billowy clouds, dark rolling storm clouds, or pure blue. It always speaks to me, this feeling of expanse before the busy day begins. And it seems to speak to Claire, too.

Four years later, though not every morning, we still greet the sky out loud in unison when we arrive at the overpass. This morning’s sky was sunny and blue with no clouds. Yet there seemed to be a brownish haze near the horizon that I found unsettling. Was I imagining that it was brown? Was my environmental-contamination-oriented mind making this up? It seemed too present to be a figment of my imagination. Of course, I kept this observation to myself, allowing Claire to solely indulge in the wonder she so deserves.

Continue reading