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At Home On Earth |
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Welcome to The Hub, a Bluedot Living newsletter that gathers good news, good food, and good tips for living every day more sustainably. |
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Welcome to The Hub, a Bluedot Living newsletter that gathers good news, good food, and good tips for living every day more sustainably. |
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If you purchase anything via one of our links, including from Amazon, we may earn a small commission. All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull. |
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SIMPLE / SMART / SUSTAINABLE / STORIES |
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We love Miles Howard’s columns about long walks (we like to call him “Miles to Go”). Here’s one about a new walk that’ll take you all the way around Prince Edward Island (that’s 435 miles). “From the minute you set foot on Prince Edward Island (PEI), it’s nearly impossible to miss the Mars-red provincial soil,” he writes. “The dirt here contains high amounts of iron-oxide, which literally causes the earth to rust and take on an autumnal hue. This red soil, paired with pine and birch forests, hidden coves, towering dunes, and fields of potato plants (the island’s top crop), makes PEI an environment built for slow wandering and savoring.”
Read more here.
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DISPATCHES FROM ALL OVER
SUSTAINABLE LIVING ADVICE
ECO-FRIENDLY RECIPES |
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DISPATCHES FROM ALL OVER · SUSTAINABLE LIVING ADVICE · ECO-FRIENDLY RECIPES |
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"Here's to long, majestic walks through nature where you confidently misidentify every species you come across, snap a pic, and then Google it later." — from a Nature Conservancy (TNC) Thread
TNC protects land and ecosystems across the planet. “The Allegheny Front,” they write of one of their conservation successes, “is teeming with wildlife, from the elusive bobcat to the vibrant cardinal flower. These species are part of what makes this landscape so special.”
Learn more about how The Nature Conservancy is protecting this vital Appalachian corridor.
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QUICK LINKS |
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Skip scrolling! Here's what you'll find in this edition of the Bluedot newsletter: |
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Whether you’re traveling through Costa Rica with professional wildlife photographers, hiking your favorite trail with your dog, or just taking a quick walk around your neighborhood, there’s a good chance you’ll encounter something beautiful every time you step out into nature.
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This salad is a delicious waste-buster — it’s designed to be customized based on what you already have in your kitchen, so you can eat up those odds and ends and come up with a filling meal when it feels like there is absolutely, positively nothing to eat in the house. Build on Sarene Wallace’s recipe, or follow four simple steps to create your own healthy grain salad from scratch.
Get the recipe.
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Picture this: You’re on a hiking trail in the forest. The light filtering through the trees shines on a little pathway off the marked trail. It looks enchanting, and you’re tempted to see where it goes. Stop right there, writes Bluedot columnist Krista Halverson: You can be curious without destroying the object of your curiosity, which you run the risk of doing every time you go off-trail. “In the United States, the public owns its public lands,” she says. “Whatever ‘ownership’ means to you, it’s all the more reason to be a good steward who protects the land we treasure.”
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Dear Dot,
I am feeling hopeful. I've dispensed with plastic baggies to preserve food and upped my game on recycling. I buy organic and try to get out of the market without too much plastic, and certainly no bags for the fruits and vegetables. All this has been manageable. But the other people in my house don't share my determination to make changes. I don't want to be a nag. Any tips?
– Ann
Dear Ann,
Let’s toast to hopeful. Hope can sometimes feel like a scarce resource itself, so anything we can do to help it proliferate is a good thing. But, yes, it can feel disheartening when those we love don’t share either our hope or the shifts we’ve made in response to the climate crisis.
Mr. Dot, for instance, is a dedicated carnivore, who has been known to crow, “Top of the food chain, baby!” in a distinctly caveman-like way when it is gently suggested that we move to a meat-free diet. He grumbles at line-dried clothes, which he declares “crunchy.” My son can be blamed for at least one degree of global warming because of the length of his hot showers, and no amount of nagging or leaving him in the dark (literally!) by turning off the bathroom lights gets him out any sooner. And my two daughters turn up their noses when I urge them to cycle to their favorite coffee shop rather than drive.
Read the rest of Dot’s answer here.
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If you make a purchase through our links, including from Amazon, we may earn a small commission. |
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Binoculars are a great tool to have for birdwatching on neighborhood walks or spotting wildlife while on the trails. Nocs Provisions hopes “to make the discovery and study of our surroundings simple” with its compact, sustainably made binoculars. Their best-selling pair is waterproof, fogproof, and comes with a No-Matter-What Lifetime warranty.
Read our review or shop now.
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The next time you want to hit the trail, follow Lizzy Fallows’s advice on How to Get Kids to Hike and make it a family affair! Her (not-so-secret) secret weapon will keep your little ones motivated and happy all the way to the finish line.
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“The Endless Fertility of Walking” |
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About 15 years ago, a friend and I decided that in our spare time, we would create a website dedicated to human-powered travel: inn-to-inn hiking, paddling, pedaling, and just plain long, contemplative weekend walks. We actually called our site Weekend Walk (sorry, it no longer exists). We each liked to travel this way (we still do), and we each wrote stories about some of our travels. Paul, my friend, wrote this story for the New York Times about paddling the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. For a bygone airline magazine, I wrote about kayaking the Erie Canal, and for another travel magazine, I penned a story about walking up the coast of Southern California, from Hermosa Beach to Malibu (via Topanga Canyon), stopping in fancy hotels along the way. (Small-world fun fact: One of my co-editors on this newsletter, Robin Jones, was my editor for that story.)
Rebecca Solnit, one of our favorite authors on all things nature and climate, said this in a piece she titled “The Endless Fertility of Walking”: “Walking, ideally, is a state of mind in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”
Here’s to finding a path to less busy-ness in the coming summer weeks. Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you next week.
–Jamie Kageleiry (and Emily Cain, Leslie Garrett, and Robin Jones)
Editors
Write us at editor@bluedotliving.com
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Leslie Garrett has been covering climate stories for close to two decades. She makes her home in Canada, west of Toronto. She’s still figuring out her favorite spot but it’s definitely near the water.
Jamie Kageleiry, a longtime magazine and newspaper editor from Martha’s Vineyard, says her favorite spot on earth is out on a kayak there, looking at birds.
Robin Jones is a Southern California native who served as an editor at Westways magazine for more than a decade. She lives in Long Beach and teaches journalism at Cal State Long Beach.
Emily Cain is a recent graduate of Cal State Long Beach, where she wrote and edited for the university’s award-winning magazine, DIG. |
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