Healing Place of Nature

Nature’s Healing Forces
Nature has strong regenerative capabilities to heal damage caused by fire, lightening, flood, earthquakes or blights. Looking closely amidst the ruins of fire or flood affected areas one can find signs of new growth and new life. Nature demonstrates the ability to survive despite strong forces that challenge her.In May 1980 Mount St. Helen’s erupted destroying an area 24 square miles. Scientists predicted the region would remain a dead zone for decades to come. Yet, only five years later after this natural devastation, a lupine bloomed at the base of the mountain, as a testimony to the tenacity and the regenerative forces of nature.

If you watch how nature deals with adversity,
continually renewing itself,
you can’t help but learn.

Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad,
Whatever is done and suffered by her creatures.
All scars she heals,
whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.

The giant sequoia trees have adapted to withstand fires by becoming fire-resistant. Black scars on the tree trunks serve as reminders those that have survived fire and lightening strikes. Fire is also a part of the sequoia’s life-cycle. Natural fires are needed to open up the forest, thin out the competing species and make way for the new seedlings.
Nature’s healing forces can serve as powerful recuperative images for those who have experienced a death or other significant loss. Images of the rebirth in nature can be useful as symbols for the strong internal forces, bringing hope of surviving the loss. From monumental newsworthy events to ordinary insignificant occurrences, one can witness the incredible destructive power and the amazing healing capabilities of nature and be reminded that:

Qualities of Nature

One has to be alone, under the sky,
Before everything falls into place and one finds
his or her own place in the midst of it all.
We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature.

There is a healing quality to nature, which has been known for centuries be it taking time to smell the roses, meditating on a mountain, lying in a wildflower field, strolling by a meandering stream, or hiking in ancient redwood groves. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, recognized this powerful attribute in his humbling statement:

Nature cures—not the physician.

People instinctively turn to outdoor and nature-loving activities as a way of relaxing and enhancing their well-being. Nature can aid in facilitating self-awareness and promoting healing. For many the outdoors is a source of inspiration, solace, guidance and regeneration.
Time spent outdoors can be restorative and healing. Whether running through a canyon, walking on the sunny beach, hiking through a fern-filled forest, scrambling over rocks along a creek side, watching the last few rays of the setting sun, strolling along a moonlit night, or just sitting breathing fresh clean air, being out in nature is one of the best prescriptions for overall health and encouraging healing.

Our Nature Biological Journal

Our Nature is the journal brought out by the Nature Conservation and Health Care Council. Our Nature places a special emphasis on research papers, miscellaneous notes, and book review in all fields of biological sciences. It also includes papers in the general fields of theoretical, experimental and descriptive ecology and environmental science.

Out in Nature

• Trash: When you are out hiking, pick up trash along the way.
• Hiking Tips: Leave No Trace, Outdoor Ethics - provides tips for campers, climbers, and hikers.
• Restoration: Organize a community group to clean up a local stream, highway, park, or beach. For opportunities to do restoration work for a local organization, check out VolunteerMatch.
• Tree-Planting: Form a tree-planting group with family and/or friends: commit to planting and maintaining an agreed-upon number of trees over your life times. Plan regular gatherings for tree-planting and watering. Log your commitments in the United Nations Billion Tree Campaign.
• Parks: Visit and help support local parks. In the U.S., reserve a campsite at a National Park through the U.S. National Park Service Reservation Center or Reserve America (includes some state parks).
• Frogs: In the USA, help to track frog and toad populations through Frogwatch USA.
• Birds: In North America, help to track bird populations through Citizen Science.
• Balloons: Never release balloons outdoors. They frequently find their way to open water (even from 100's of miles away) and can harm or kill turtles, whales, and other marine mammals.
• Stargazing: Stargazing schedule - provides current information about stargazing events.

Conservancy of nature

The Nature Conservancy's Migratory Bird Program works to protect critical habitat that birds need for nesting, raising their young, spending their winters and resting during migration. Everyone can help to assist in smart bird conservation. Here are a few things you can do right now and every day to help protect birds.

“The place of birds in nature is entirely unique,” Gossard and Harry write. “Each species performs a service which no other can so well accomplish; each is structurally modified for the particular work nature demands of it.

“A country without birds,” they note, “would become a desolate waste, unable to support life.”

Crazy by Nature

As one of the first winegrowers in the Southern Hemisphere to practice the use of biodynamic techniques in the vineyard and cellar, our practices include working with the sun, stars, planets and moon as well using special animal, mineral and herbal preparations that enhance the life (bio) energy (dynamic) of all living things on our farm. This may seem as crazy as a lunatic on a full moon but it makes us happy and even more enthusiastic as each season commences.

It’s no secret that the best bottle of wine is made of grapes from a vine that has been grown with sensitivity to the environment.

We’ve learnt that if you are kind to Nature she will always repay you, with quality. We don’t use herbicides, insecticides, systemic fungicides or soluble fertilisers.
We try and build a balance. To create harmony so that there will be no place for “dis-ease”.

Nature Works

Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness. Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread and fear. You think you might because in the 'real' world you have been conditioned to fear nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive. You have been taught, brainwashed, to distrust and ignore your instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgements. You would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then, probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command your attention, you would probably play with your new 'friends', exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all species in nature do. Imagine, too, that there is an unseen force that, for a while, protects you -- pulls you away before you can touch plants that are poisonous, guides you to safe, comfortable places to sleep, eat, drink and play, and repels predators, until you have learned from this force -- let's say you call it ma -- how to survive without its intervention, at which point ma leaves you to your own devices. Your group becomes, in fact, a hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of civilization -- language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being, self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness, awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for nature, and, to the extent needed, creativity -- all the elements of natural systems shown in the diagram above. You will instinctively hunt together and gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert peers. There will be a 'pecking order' of sorts, based on consensus of, and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable -- keen senses, physical strength, creativity -- but the tribe will be egalitarian. There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. Some members of the tribe will be eaten by predators, and others will contract diseases and go off by themselves to die, but these deaths will not cause the members of the tribe to become fearful, paranoid, selfish, greedy or violent. They will simply be accepted as the way life is. Your tribe of amnesiacs will know of no other way to respond. You will respect and flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from them, but you will not fear them.

That is how nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but because life is wonderful. When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in a tree in winter, don't feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who lack them) instinctive survival talents -- they need a lot of food in winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they can't, they simply hibernate, and if they even suspect they won't be able to, they'll migrate. They can fly, and I envy them, I wish I were one of them. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze or starve to death -- famine is a modern human invention, due to our huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird, it almost certainly succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries: Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed.

The people in your amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous. Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we have lost much of our sensory acuity and openness, largely because we live most of our lives in cities and indoors, areas of great sensory homogeneity, poverty and concealment. We no longer have either rich sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses, opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings in nature, so that even in those rare times when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive, closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge.

Our ignorance of nature, combined with our collective arrogance (because of our unquestioned evolutionary success), leads us to believe that we are the only sentient, emotional, intelligent creatures on the planet, and to tell ourselves that all other life couldn't possibly have done so well for so many millions of years because they're smart, sensitive and creative, so it must be because they're automatons just doing what they've been 'programmed' to do. But just as economists and historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man, scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communications has so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary intelligence, great awareness of their own existence, and profound emotion.

Jeff Masson's work on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants Weep, supports this theory. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us to be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentally different. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate. Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do so in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidence that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of deep emotion, long-lasting memory and astute reasoning.

I have since read other works that ascribe similar intelligence and emotional sensitivity to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's book Mind of the Raven is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). At this point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am incredulous -- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of 'all things natural' is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind acceptance of religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position. I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs, but I can only hope that, with people like Masson and Heinrich systematically debunking the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will at least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what other animals have to teach us, and to say to us.

In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it's quite possible that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that they are more 'sensitive' in every sense of the word than we are, that they 'feel' more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then don't they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do -- maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and clumsy human ones that we don't 'hear' them. Or perhaps it's just that they don't have to -- maybe we developed 'sophisticated' abstract language not because we were uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise instructions about man-made processes (like harvesting crops) in our strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How sophisticated a language do you need to say "danger", "food", "yes", "no", and "I love you", and ultimately what else is really important to say? I'm being facetious of course -- humans now need our language and our technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a better way to live, and don't need sophisticated language or technology to do so.

Man Lived in Harmony With Nature for Three Million Years

To appreciate the truth about nature you need to look at it from outside the frame, the filter through you've been taught to look at everything. In other words, you need to unlearn, or at least forget, what you've learned, been told, and come to understand about nature and about the entire world in which we live. We need to give you a kind of cultural amnesia for awhile. If you're willing, let's see if we can do that.

Most people have a picture of humans at the top of a long, complex evolutionary tree, an inevitability, a pinnacle, a culmination. In fact the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House, teaches us that homo sapiens is in evolutionary terms a small, recent and ordinary evolution, a small part of a small and undistinguished (if you study variations in our DNA) branch of the tree of life. He also teaches us that evolution is not about 'up' at all, but rather a constant series of experiments, variations, random walks from what has succeeded, as nature's method of ensuring the resiliency of life on Earth by checking to see if this minor variation might be a bit hardier in this ecosystem, that minor variation in that ecosystem etc. Most of these variations fail, but quite a few succeed, so to the outside observer all life on Earth, and perhaps on every planet, appears to be a single living organism that takes root, flowers, grows to occupy as much space as the climate will permit, and then continues to change in a balance, an equilibrium, responding to climate change and introducing new random variations in an eternal quest to find forms that are best suited to survive in the little place in space where it happened to land. Gould's lessons are:

• Darwinian selection, this 'random walk' of evolution in which new variations are constantly introduced and tried out to see if they're better suited to the local ecosystem, tends to favour, for short periods, new species that are bigger, fiercer, and smarter than those currently prevailing. By 'fiercer' Gould means species that have the ability and tendency to catch and eat a lot of prey. By 'smarter' he means species that can discover how to use tools to supplement the natural tools evolution endowed them with. For brief periods, these bigger, fiercer, smarter creatures squeeze out the rest, decreasing biodiversity and biocomplexity. The result is temporary fragility of the ecosystem to the point the dominant creatures begin to destroy the system's ability to support other life, including its own prey. The dominant creatures then find themselves overcrowded, short of food, and/or vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, as shown in the chart above. The consequent decline in numbers of the dominant species removes the stress so ecological equilibrium is gradually restored, biodiversity and biocomplexity again explode, and the system thrives in ever-shifting balance until the next big, fierce, smart creature evolves. These cycles of evolutionary change and re-balance occur constantly at the local level, and sometimes, when the re-balancing forces take longer to emerge, at a regional or global level. So natural selection paradoxically favours short-term prosperity of creatures that, in the longer run, could be detrimental or even catastrophic to the ecosystem as a whole. In any laboratory with trillions of experiments going on constantly, some of them will get temporarily out of control. In these cases, nature has to bring in the big fire extinguishers -- epidemic disease, cannibalism and war -- to restore the balance quickly, and the result, which fortunately is rare, is called an Extinction Event. These events, which punctuate the history of our planet, are described in Michael Boulter's book Extinction.
  
• In some cases, drastic changes in the ecosystem can also precipitate Extinction Events. Most scientists believe that the last two major Extinction Events were caused by massive volcanic eruptions and by a meteor impact. Both occurrences blocked out the sun with dust particles and prevented photosynthesis, and the latter of these caused the premature extinction of the dinosaurs. Much more recently, another meteor impact may have caused Earth to wobble on its axis, producing drastic and sudden climate change and the Ice Ages and causing a series of lesser Extinction Events. The resultant loss of prey may have led to the decision of homo sapiens, up until then a hunter-gatherer for three million years, to try out an agricultural culture, the culture which currently dominates the planet and ironically threatens to bring about the next Extinction Event prematurely.
  
• After the next major Extinction Event, whenever it occurs, Gould argues that the new evolutionary cycle will produce species that are so different from us as to be unimaginable: The probability of vertebrates (which most larger Earth creatures and all Sci-Fi aliens improbably are) emerging from any primordial soup is infinitesimally small. But whatever it looks like (if it's even 'visible' or otherwise discernible by our species), if it's big, fierce and smart it is likely to exterminate itself before it visits us in UFOs, or vice versa. So hoping for aliens to rescue us from our cloddishness, or hoping to find a new habitable world before our time runs out, or hoping to find answers in SETI, are all just foolish wastes of time and energy. We're in this all alone, and there's no deus in this machina, no matter how much we pray for one.

Gould's theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists and the religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other evolutionists who would like to believe evolution and the dominance of the human species is a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose, result or guiding hand. This view of all life on Earth as a single, self-regulating organism is called the Gaia Hypothesis, so named by James Lovelock. Unlike the previously prevailing view of most scientists, and historians, that life on Earth is a constant, violent, competitive struggle, this hypothesis sees life on Earth as a cooperative undertaking for mutual advantage. Earth as a single organism, Lovelock argues, is analogous to the human body -- the constituent parts work together to make the whole successful, rather than constantly warring with each other for dominance and space.

In fact prehistoric man's life was not, as we have been led to believe, "short, nasty and brutish", but idyllic and leisurely, for three million years, argue revisionist economist-historians Peter Jay, in his book The Wealth of Man, and Marshall Sahlins, in his book Original Affluence. Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a meteorite plunged the planet into darkness and exterminated the dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of life in dynamic equilibrium. That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded. Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per week. As these species became extinct (aided perhaps by the Ice Ages and by the increasing sophistication of our hunting tools), we turned to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and epidemic disease. In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming, exhaustion of arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation, shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. Jay is a pessimist about the competitiveness that our civilization has inspired, believing that we are unlikely to ever put the collective interest of all life on Earth ahead of our individual interests in the face of ever-exploding population and growing scarcity.

So we live now on a world where two systems coexist uncomfortably with each other: The 600 million year old natural system of biodiversity, experimental evolution, and continuous re-balancing, punctuated by Extinction Events, and the 30 thousand year old man-made system of continuous growth, expansion, internal competition, and innovative technologies. We'll look at the man-made system later. For now, let's go back and try to understand the natural system.

Cause and Problems of our Nature

Civilization was a well-intentioned response to a sudden drastic shortage of human food (possibly arising from overhunting of large game and/or the last ice age). But it was not an instinctive way to live, and needed a lot of artificial constructs and controls to work. Our civilization systematically brainwashes us into staggering cultural homogeneity and imaginative poverty, and to believe ours is the only way to live -- that there is no other human way. To do so it must get us to forget or deny the





5 truths above, and teach us these great myths:

• That our instincts are unreliable (what nature 'tells' us to do), and logic and morality are infallible (what human codes tell us to do);
  
• That life is a struggle of 'good vs. evil', and that we are inherently weak, selfish and lazy;
• That it's good to be 'normal' and to be like other people, and that we're all part of society and not ultimately, terribly alone;
  
• That we must be unconditionally obedient to our 'superiors', their hierarchy and their laws, or society and order will collapse;
  
• That our well-being is appropriately measured by our material possessions and our ability to acquire more;
  
• That disparity of wealth, health and dignity is necessary and inevitable and that with hard work 'have-nots' can become 'haves';
  
• That we must all work long, hard hours at unsatisfying jobs or we will all suffer and starve;
  
• That humans have an inherent right to all the land and all the resources of Earth (and even beyond);
• That history began with civilization, before which life was short, fearful, nasty and brutish (and in nature and tribal cultures, it still is).
6. We are instinctively responsive to, and responsible for, everything we have control over. In nature that is the immediate community -- what goes on outside is not one's business. But now that we, as a 'global community' control the whole world we cannot respond, cannot bear the commensurate responsibility. This conflict between our instincts and reality, along with the stress of overpopulation and separation from nature, has made us all mentally ill. This illness manifests itself in violence and war, hatred, abuse, greed, jealousy, and fear. We are helpless to do what we 'know' we must. It is like facing 'Sophie's choice' (being asked by the Gestapo to decide which of your children to spare from the gas chamber) over and over and over. We cannot bear to know, so we turn off, we hide inside, we distract ourselves. It is only when we don't know, and cannot even imagine, that we can go on, and tolerate the world we have created. This makes it easier for us to accept the brainwashing that ours is the only way to live, to tolerate the abuses and outrages that weknow are going on behind closed doors, and to accept the arguments of skeptics and apologists and holocaust denyers that it's not really that bad, or perhaps it's even good, or at least it's divine will so it's beyond our control, there's nothing we can do about it, we're not really responsible
7. As a consequence, we are poised, by the end of this century, to create a world that contains one billion Americans and fourteen billion people, and uses eight Earths worth of resources (at current regeneration rates) just to meet human needs. A world that will, as a direct consequence of this overcrowding and unsustainable consumption, be preoccupied with catastrophic famines, epidemic (new) human diseases, crop failures, cannibalism, crop failures, nuclear and biological wars, water rationing and desertification, economic depression, catastrophic terrorism, cascading weather disasters, and the decline of democracy, constitutional liberalism, and the rule of law. A world, arguably, not worth living in.

What we have forgotten to our nature.

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."

1. Man is not Special, not the Crown of Creation, or a Species Apart, but rather a fairly minor evolutionary adaptation to one ordinary branch of the tree of life on Earth. The impact and 'success' of this species is no more an indication of greater importance, predestination or divine will than is the impact and success of the mosquito, HIV, bacteria, cancer cells or the Plague.
2. Our planet is a single self-managing organism. All life on Earth exists to sustain, nourish and support all other life on Earth. As with a human body or any other organism, that is only possible when each component of the organism does its part, in balance and harmony with the rest. In that sense the Earth is sacred, it demands and earns respect and obedience to its 'laws' because that is essential to the survival of all life.
3. The Earth is full of sentient, intelligent, communicative, emotional creatures. Most human moralities and religions seem to hold that creatures with these attributes deserve freedom from harrassment, suffering and enslavement, and the right to exist. Therefore much human activity, which deprives all non-humans of these rights and freedoms, is an atrocity no less despicable than human genocide, holocaust, torture and slavery, and must be stopped.
4. Small is beautiful, and place gives us identity: The community as the basic political unit and Natural Enterprise as the basic economic unit work best because they can be self-selecting and self-managing, and are extremely adaptive. In nature, the community teaches you what you need to live, it defines you and gives you purpose, it anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. Larger political units (states) and economic units (corporations) are inherently unwieldy, inflexible and less democratic. Because of their sheer size they are detached, remote, and cannot possibly understand or respond to our needs. Forged from both idealism and cynical greed for power, these abominations serve no useful purpose except to protect us from other large political and economic units (and they do that poorly).
   
5. We learn what we're shown, not what we're told. Our senses provide us what we need to learn, to really understand, to be happy. When we live in our minds, we close ourselves off from so much. Formal education is futile. To bring about change we need to show people something that works better, and reconnect them with their senses, their imagination, the Earth.

Respect our nature and save mother earth.

The gathered armies are compared to flocks of birds. In this comparison, Homer intends the image of a mass of birds rather than a careful formation of flight. The armies are gathered in mass groups and the sound of the voices and weapons are similar to the squawking and flapping of birds. The warriors are difficult to distinguish from each other. The juxtaposition of a nature simile for a host of fighting men further evokes the chaos of battle.

The moving armies are compared to the ocean in terms of size and sound. The sides clash like waves.

It is now the high time to do our own share in protecting Earth and her wonderful creatures.

Our planet is indeed gasping for breath right now, our harmful pollutions is indeed choking her slowly and continues to stripped her with her ozone layer. I think it is about time to give our timely response to this alarming state of the only planet we live in, by doing our own share of protecting her with doing simple things that will surely stir big difference. For if not, we might be harming ourselves in the years ahead as well, for nature has its own destructive way of getting back at us humans, the signs of earth's displeasure with inappropriate and harmful activities of humans are now seen and felt all across the globe like the global warming, climate change, acid rain, drought, flash floods and other forms of natural catastrophes. Here are some practical and small ways that could help our planet get a sigh of relief. Collective small efforts by those who are genuinely concerned with earth's welfare will inevitably help her by great leap and bounds.