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March 2008 Newsletter - Wellness! Upcoming UAS EventsSpring Equinox Community Connect!
If you are with a local organization or green business that wants to
share the work you’re doing or meet potential volunteers or staff, this
is a great casual space to make those connections.
Featured ArticleBay Area Environmental Youth Groups form a CoalitionIn the process of UAS' Mapping the Ecology of the Sustainability Movement (MEM) Project, we have come across some ways groups are organizing and networking to share resources. Youth leaders and programs that are part of the Bay Area Youth Environmental Coalition (YEC) have created an on-line presence. UAS is helping the collaboration process occur.
WISER Earth Network Map of the Bay Area Youth Coalition
Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products 101Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCP) is the name given to a group of products most Americans use on a daily basis, grouped together because they all contain a host of chemicals and are ubiquitous pollutants. Hair products, cosmetics, deodorants and legal drugs are just a few of the categories in this classification of hazardous substances that we use to groom ourselves and allegedly maintain health. As we ingest medicines they travel through our bodies and are excreted in the wastewater which is treated, but not for chemical compounds and synthetic hormones found in the PPCP we use. Further, medications are often not consumed and for disposal they are either landfilled, incinerated, or flushed. None of these methods is strictly environmentally sound. The chart below shows some ways PPCP pollute and the articles that follow offer some education and alternatives. 
EPA's Origins and Fates of PPCPs in the Environment: Click image to download PDF Inner ViewJoanna Macy's Practices for Activists
Image: Portrait by Robert Shetterly from his series "Americans Who Tell the Truth"
BREATHING THROUGH
Basic to most spiritual traditions, as well as to the systems view of the
world, is the recognition that we are not separate, isolated entities,
but integral and organic parts of the vast web of life. As such, we are
like neurons in a neural net, through which flow currents of awareness
of what is happening to us, as a species and as a planet. In that
context, the pain we feel for our world is a living testimony to our
interconnectedness with it. If we deny this pain, we become like
blocked and atrophied neurons, deprived of life's flow and weakening
the larger body in which we take being. But if we let it move through
us, we affirm our belonging; our collective awareness increases. We can
open to the pain of the world in confidence that it can neither shatter
nor isolate us, for we are not objects that can break. We are resilient
patterns within a vaster web of knowing. |
