Wild Earth Integration

Hello everybody! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones and didn’t succumb to the turkey coma. I sure did. Turkey coma included.

With the New Year approaching faster than a falcon dive, now is a great time to reflect on the past year, as well as the things you’re thankful for.

This Wednesday, I thought I’d give you a little rundown of some of the things that many people take for granted in nature, but without which, we’d be toast.

• Water. It can get pretty easy to take water for granted. Not only is it available from your tap on a whim, but nearly every store in the developed world has a few choices for bottled water as well. But I’m not just talking about the availability of water – I’m talking about the properties of water itself. For example, the molecules of water (H20) expand when they freeze. This means that during winter, ice floats on the top of our lakes, rivers and streams. Think about that – if ice didn’t float, whole lakes would freeze through and we’d lose all of the animals within them. The unique properties of water are also what allow for snowflakes to form and your bodies to function properly. Water is the only substance on Earth that behaves like this. How cool is that? Go ahead, drink up.

• Trees. You can often be written off as a tree hugging hippie if you mention that you love trees, but really – you owe your life to trees. Forget about how beautiful they are or how they provide shade and wind barriers when you need them. Trees exhale the very basic element you need to live: oxygen. Deep inside a tree’s leaves are little green bundles that undergo photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a fancy way of saying ‘makes food from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide’. When you breathe out, you exhale the carbon dioxide that trees need to make their food. As a way of saying thank-you, trees release oxygen during the process. This is the oxygen you breathe in everyday. It’s a win-win, but most people wander around oblivious to where their clean air comes from. Don’t be one of those people.

• Your body. Yes, although you are probably quite festive from a week of splurging on holiday treats, egg nog and mashed potatoes, your body is really something you should marvel at. When you bump into the corner of the coffee table, you get a lovely bruise. That’s self healing. When you carry on with your day-to-day life, a small section of your brain is running the show, making sure you breathe, blink, sweat and have a pulse. You don’t have to even think about it, it just happens. Awesome. And the most badass fact of all? You began as a single cell. Today, you are a mass of trillions of cells, all specially designed to do their jobs. You have eye cells and bone cells and stomach cells and brain cells. But they all started out as one cell, that divided into two, that divided into four. The rest is history.

Of course, there are thousands of aspects of the natural world to be thankful for. But to me, these three are the kickers. Maybe a good New Year’s resolution for 2010 would be to sit back and reflect on how awesomely intricate this world really is. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher and also one of the world’s first scientists once said “In all things in nature there is something of the marvelous.”

He was right.