My suggestion for Earth Day: Go outdoors and seek new places that expand your understanding of what it is to be a good steward of the Earth. Put nature preserves in California on your list. When you visit, pay close attention to the landscape and think of it the way you would when considering remodeling a room. What would you do to restore the site to the way it once looked?
That’s why preserves exist: to manage lands thoughtfully and purposefully with endangered species and/or cultural treasures in mind. A few weeks ago, I explored a handful of nature preserves in Southern California. Many have short, easy trails and are good places to be
Credit Heyday Books
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of global climate breakdown. So how might we develop the inner resolve to confront it? Full Ecology, a collaboration between social-cultural psychologist Mary Clare and longtime science writer Gary Ferguson, suggests a path forward. Breaking the modern impulse to see humans as separate from nature, Clare and Ferguson encourage us to learn from the “supremely methodical and highly improvisational” natural systems that touch our lives. True change, they argue, begins with us stopping and questioning assumptions about our place in the world.
Mary M. Clare and Gary Ferguson have each dedicated more than thirty years to exploring the world’s social and natural ecologies Clare as a graduate professor of psychology and education, Ferguson as a nature and conservation-science writer. Their individual work has now come together in Full Ecology, a movement devoted to the idea that we can best serve both the natural and h