Green Options

In Lake Huron, one of North America’s Great Lakes, sinkholes formed by water erosion host exotic organisms in what looks like an alien world.

Instead of the large fish common to the rest of the lake, the bizarre life forms that thrive in the lake’s sinkholes include purple cyanobacteria, ghostly floating pony-tails, and other organisms similar to those found in Antarctic sinkholes and deep-sea, hydrothermal vents.

“You have this pristine fresh water lake that has what amounts to materials from 400 million years ago … being pushed out into the lake,” says team co-leader Steven A. Ruberg of the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Whether it is a pet or a family member, one of the toughest things to deal with as a parent is death.  We’ve lost two dogs and a dear friend, who was the father of my daughter’s good friend, and last weekend, my grandmother died.  Although my children had only met her a handful of times, my grief and loss was shared with my children.  I can’t hide in the closet and cry.

I have always been honest with my children, and I want them to view death as naturally as they consider birth.  It is a celebration of life.  At times, it is relief to have young children around to hold and hug.  At other times, children complicate the picture with their needs which forces a parent to push their grief aside.  One of the most healing activities in our family is to share memories of the loved one who has gone on to the next life.

For as often as we do eat, it seems as if most of us don’t think too much about what we’re putting into our bodies. With food production so far removed from our every day lives, it’s easy to ignore where our food comes from and what it’s impact may be. But what we put on our plates has a larger footprint than what we drive. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,

“Livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”

The things we choose to eat can obviously have an enormous impact on the planet and everything on it, including ourselves. Naturally then, our diet choices can say a lot about our ethics and beliefs. They can even be a political statement and a form of activism. I think that every choice we make has the potential to change the world, and certainly what I choose to eat has an impact.

This world is founded on some basic laws, including cause and effect. Every action has a reaction. Every cause has an effect. And we may think that we’re all separate beings in this world, separate beings and entities. But in reality, we are all connected, we are all intertwined, and we are all One. And thus it follows, for everything we do, it has an effect not only on us, but on everyone else and everything else around us and even beyond.

So, we are tackling the problem of environmental fragility today. And how did we get to this place? How did we get to this situation?

Of course, there are a lot of scientific explanations, political explanations, systematic explanations, and so on.

But how did we get here, really?

By every action ever made — by us, by others, and by all of us combined.

By every thought.

By every feeling and every want or need in our hearts and expressed in our thoughts, our words, and our actions.

We can see that no matter how hard we try, we will fail to address the problems we face today if we don’t address our own personal sustainability and situation. What do I mean by personal sustainability?

Encyclopedia of Life Web Site Many big ideas are born at the TED Conference (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design). The conference brings together the world's big thinkers and doers to deliver talks on many topics. Every year, three prize winners are chosen and they each present one wish.

This year, biologist E.O. Wilson was the recipient of one of the TED prizes, and

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