In my household, food is not just love and the basic stuff of life, it's a tool in the box we draw from to keep my sculptor husband healthy through brain cancer, and three craniotimies in the past 17 months. We eat mostly local and organic foods grown and produced in a way that nurtures us and the landscape where we live. (The way we see it, our health and the health of our environment are closely linked.)

When I wrote "Dying to Be Green" for the Sept/Oct issue of Audubon Magazine, I focused on people and the impact of our current funeral and burial customs on the environment. It's considerable, and not particularly green--although that's changing, as the article shows. But what about our pets? Do they "go green" into that Great Beyond? 

Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world's nations wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order.

When my memoir, Walking Nature Home, was published earlier this spring, I knew I'd be going on the road to promote it. I had mixed feelings about that. You meet wonderful people, but being "on stage" all the time is hard. Authors on tour end up doing some crazy stuff: David Sedaris puts a tip jar on the table!

Book promotion that way isn't very green: All that travel uses energy (mine and the planet's) and adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. (And then there's the road-food.) My memoir's about reconnecting with nature to save your life. It didn't make sense to promote it with a lot of planet-harming travel.

My husband, Richard, and I have been working to decrease our carbon footprint and increase our "green" index for years. Living lightly has always been a philosophical decision for us. It seems the generous thing to do, a way to share the planet's resources more equitably among all of the species who travel with us on the globe Buckminster Fuller dubbed "Spaceship Earth." Recently though, I realized that going green also has a more immediate, very personal benefit: it saves us green--money, that is.

Kids need time outside. It seems basic, but we're still re-learning that lesson after totally forgetting it for about a generation. Two new studies reinforce the importance of the outdoors for kids' health.

Imagine motoring from Hawaii to California through the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an immense region of the ocean where high pressure rules, trade winds fail, and currents trace a circle many hundreds of miles across, corralling anything that floats into a slowly rotating vortex. A few days off Hawaii, you notice something odd about the sea around you: it is laden with a subsurface "soup" of plastic trash, from soccer balls and kayaks to water bottles, snarls of polypropylene rope, and bladder-like shopping bags.

Western bumblebee on scarlet gilia [photo copyright David Inouye]

Last week, on what passes for a warm spring afternoon here in the south-central Rockies, I planted the heirloom tomato starts I've nurtured indoors since early March. As I worked, I scanned my kitchen garden for insects.

On our way across Nevada's Great Basin two weeks ago on U.S. Highway 50, "America's Loneliest Road," my husband Richard and I passed through spring hawk migration. It seemed that golden eagles soared on impossibly long wings over each wide, flat-bottomed valley; red-tailed hawks rode the air over each up-tilted mountain range.

With spring on its way and my garden beckoning, I've been thinking about a conversation with Frances E. Kuo, director of the University of Illinois Landscape and Human Health Laboratory on her research on kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and time spent in nature.