NATURAL HEALING

What beautiful things surround you? From regal snow-capped mountain ranges or transparent aquamarine ocean waters, the beauties that nature offers delight people around the globe. When you love something, you want to talk about it. Sometimes there are  no words , but sometimes there’s a perfect expression to capture the awesomeness of natural sights. Here are the eight words that every nature lover should know. Psithurism Who says trees don’t talk? When the wind rustles the leaves, the trees seem to be whispering the secrets of the universe. Psithurims the sound of the wind in the trees, is an obsolete word derived from the Greek word for whispering. Smultronställe In Swedish, a smultronställe is a small, remote place where wild strawberries grow. Imagine a pretty place in the wilderness, a special, hidden place where you can relax and enjoy the smell of fresh berries ripening in the sun. Swedes also use this word to talk about “rare moments of peaceful tranq...

Half the earth relatively intact from global human influence Clear opportunities to conserve what remains Roughly half of Earth's ice-free land remains without significant human influence, according to a study from a team of international researchers led by the National Geographic Society and the University of California, Davis.  The study, published in the journal  Global Change Biology , compared four recent global maps of the conversion of natural lands to anthropogenic land uses to reach its conclusions. The more impacted half of Earth's lands include cities, croplands, and places intensively ranched or mined. "The encouraging takeaway from this study is that if we act quickly and decisively, there is a slim window in which we can still conserve roughly half of Earth's land in a relatively intact state," said lead author Jason Riggio, a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology. The study, published June 5 on ...