"Remind yourself what it is you're trying save: nature," writes author David de Rothschild in The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook.
Busy with work, errands and household chores, we all too often treat the outdoors simply as an unavoidable transition from the house to the car to the school to our jobs to the store to the restaurant and back home again. If we're not careful, nature simply fades into the background of our lives. That's why we all need Essential Skill #32 in the Handbook:
Get lost in nature.
It's literally time to stop and smell the roses, whether they're in your own front yard or a field of flowers in the Holland.
"There are still 1.8 million square miles of unexplored rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon," writes de Rothschild. "Nearly one-quarter of the Earth's land is mountains waiting to be climbed. There are almost 600,000 miles of coastline -- much of it untouched -- and millions of square miles of glorious desert waiting to be crossed."
In other words, the world we're trying to save from global warming is still alive and well out there. The more we take the time to enjoy it, the harder we'll fight to keep it.
Take the time to enjoy your own backyard at least 15 minutes a day. Get your kids involved in outdoor activities and sports. Take your family camping, hiking, skiing or whitewater rafting. And plan vacations to places where the biggest tourist attractions are the landscapes, not the shopping malls.
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We live in Arizona where there's only three months -- during the scorching summer heat -- when you can't comfortably do things outside. So as a writer who works from home, I love writing in the backyard. It's like a bird santuary out there. And when we do plan vacations, it's typically camping trips on the beach in southern California.
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