Life Changes
Healing Through Storytelling: Lessons from The Odyssey
The journey of Odysseus in Homer's 'The Odyssey' offers profound insights into healing...
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- Written by: California Gardening
Start your raised bed garden by converting your existing lawn area to a raised bed. We go thru all the steps from installing the beds, protecting it from critters and adding cardboard and raised bed mix.
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- Written by: Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery
When we broke ground for a garden at our 80-year-old house in the middle of Seattle, we took the most obvious thing for granted.
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- Written by: Cheralyn Darcey
The opportunity to connect to Earth and her gifts in modern times is often waved away as a childish fantasy or an outdated practice, yet the impact of this disconnect is creating huge problems in our environment and mental health. To those who wave away our connectedness with Earth as a fantasy, I offer you an alternative way to consider these practices.
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- Written by: Sarah McQuate
Researchers have genetically modified a common houseplant—pothos ivy—to remove chloroform and benzene from the air around it.
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- Written by: Charles Eisenstein
When it is done properly, organic growing methods can deliver two to three times the yield of conventional methods. Of course if you take two fields and plant each with a monocrop, then the one without pesticides will do worse than the one with, but that isn't really what organic farming is.
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- Written by: Linda B. Glaser-Cornell University
Researchers have uncovered exactly where a key protein forms before it triggers the flowering process in plants.
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- Written by: Lizzy Lowe, Macquarie University; et al
The weather is getting warmer, and gardens are coming alive with bees, flies, butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises, beetles, millipedes, centipedes, and spiders.
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- Written by: Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine
In Norway, a high-tech seed vault flooded from melting permafrost. In Montana, locals keep their seeds in the library.
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- Written by: Mike Williams, Rice University
A new device can produce enough food to make one salad per week for an entire year—and do it inside an apartment.
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- Written by: Araz Hachadourian, Paulina Phelps, and Olivia Anderson, YES! Magazine
In the heat zone of Louisville, Kentucky, 170 residents have been trained as “citizen foresters.”
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- Written by: Blaine Friedlander, Cornell University
Farmers looking to reduce reliance on pesticides, herbicides, and other pest management tools may want to heed the advice of agricultural scientists: Let nature be nature—to a degree.
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- Written by: Ken Roseboro
A new report has found that U.S. land for organic farming reached 4.1 million acres in 2016, a new record and an 11 percent increase compared to 2014.
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- Written by: Chris Williams, University of Melbourne
As the weather warms and days lengthen, your attention may be turning to that forgotten patch of your backyard. This week we’ve asked our experts to share the science behind gardening. So grab a trowel and your green thumbs, and dig in.
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- Written by: Bob Cooper, Ensia
Tiny, biointensive operations show smallholder farmers from around the world how they can grow far more food than conventional approaches.
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- Written by: Cat Johnson, Shareable
On a recent Monday evening in Seattle’s Central District, a handful of people gathered to work on a community farm. They pulled weeds, talked about the best ways to string up tomatoes, checked the progress of the greens and beans, harvested radishes and planted wildflowers.
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- Written by: Andy Fell, University of California, Davis
Plant biologists have discovered how sunflowers use their internal circadian clock, acting on growth hormones, to follow the sun during the day as they grow.
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- Written by: Nigel Paul, Lancaster University
The one fact about plants that most people probably remember from school is that they use sunlight to make their own food. That process, photosynthesis, means that plants are dependent on sunlight.
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- Written by: InnerSelf Staff
These herbs aren't just for cooking—here's how you can use them to treat ailments from asthma to anxiety.
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- Written by: Alessandro Ossola, University of Melbourne and Matthew Burns, University of Melbourne
Urban flooding represents the most common yet severe environmental threat to cities and towns worldwide. Future changes in rainfall extremes are likely to increase this threat, even in areas that could become drier.
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- Written by: Rebecca Whittle, Lecturer, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University
With more people than ever living in cities, how do we reconcile our need for fresh fruit and vegetables with the challenges of life in an urban environment where the time and space for gardening are limited?
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- Written by: Lauren C. Ponisio, University of California, Berkeley
Some farmers have turned to less chemically-intensive techniques to reduce the negative impact of agriculture, such as organic farming, which has been shown to outperform conventional farming by many standards of environmental sustainability. The question is whether we can meet the demand for food, which is predicted to rise substantially in the next 50 years.
