Natural Environment Blog

Being an Amazon associate, I was pleased to receive an email from Amazon regarding their Amazon Green program.

Amazon has designed banners for Amazon associates to promote green products from the Amazon Green catalog.

Amazon describes Amazon Green as:

A cross-category program that includes a list of products that customers have selected as the best green products offered by Amazon.com and a place for customers to discover Amazon’s entire green product selection

With the banners, Amazon encourages affiliates to promote Green cleaning supplies, ENERGY STAR office electronics, high-efficiency lighting and the Amazon Green program.

So being an Amazon associate, it would be remiss of me not to promote the Amazon Green program!

Being someone who is passionate about the natural environment, it makes sense that I prefer to eat natural foods. By ‘natural’ I mean whole foods, or non-processed foods.

As passionate as I am about eating natural foods, it’s all too easy to find myself eating processed foods without thinking about it. In today’s society, it’s difficult to escape processed food. Even when I think I’m buying a natural ingredient, I later find out that it has actually been processed to some degree!

There are definite benefits to be had from eating whole, non-processed, foods. In eating natural foods, you’re letting nature take care of you as intended. Natural foods are full of nutrients to help keep you healthy. On the other hand, by eating processed foods, you’re injecting stuff into your body that nature hadn’t intended!

Anyway, if you prefer to include natural foods within your diet, check out these natural foods nutrition facts. I recently created this to help readers make informed decisions about the food they eat.

If you’re someone who fills your body with processed foods, try switching to a diet rich in whole, natural foods. I guarantee you’ll start to feel much healthier.

Eight years ago in India, cows were found to be dying on the streets from what was initially thought to be a mystery disease. Closer inspection revealed that the cows were dying from plastic bags. They were mistakenly ingesting the plastic bags while eating food at the side of the roads.

At the time, it was estimated that over 3,000 cows were dying each month from plastic bags. According to the audio story attached to this article by the National Public Radio, between 15,000 and 20,000 cows die each month from plastic bags.

Unfortunately, although a plastic bag ban was pushed for, the plastic bag industry managed to persuade against it. In the end, only ultra-thin plastic bags were banned. But it appears that these ultra-thin plastic bags are continuing to be manufactured and distributed in India.

So the result is that more and more cows are continuing to die an excruciatingly painful death from ingesting unused plastic bags.

I recently wrote about Peter Lik’s amazing photos of the natural environment. After writing that article, I realized that I couldn’t write about Peter Lik without writing about Craig Potton!

So here goes…

Craig Potton is a well known New Zealand photographer and conservationist.

I first came across his photos when doing a Google image search for New Zealand nature photos. Every now and then I would see an absolutely stunning photo and click through to see who took the photo. It seemed that every time this happened, the photographer was Craig Potton!

Since then, I’ve explored the Craig Potton Gallery website and seen some amazing photos. I encourage you to take a look too.

Here’s what Craig once said about photography and nature:

A good photo can sometimes be an arrow to the heart of things, alluding to or eliciting an immediate encounter. It is the nature of art and the way of nature to push us beyond the narrow realities we often become trapped in, to new or forgotten realms of pleasure.

Craig is co-founder and co-owner of Craig Potton Publishing. He has written and published a range of books featuring his own photography. He has also done photography work on movies such as Lord of the Rings, Peter Pan and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Having been born in New Zealand myself, I know how beautiful the scenery can be. It’s certainly a great environment to get a wide range of different landscape shots. It’s always a pleasure to see photos of that environment taken by a master such as Craig.

To see more of Craig’s photos, check out the Craig Potton Gallery.

If you’re like me, you’ll love photos of the natural environment. In fact, the reason I started this website was because of my love for the natural environment.

When I first visited Cairns (Australia) at the end of 2006, I came across the Peter Lik photo gallery near the esplanade. I was blown away by Peter’s photography! His photos are amazing. Since then, I’ve moved to Cairns and have visited the gallery several more times. His photos never cease to amaze me!

Peter’s philosophy is to try and get people to slow down and see the world that they might have missed. Many of us get so caught up in day to day living that it’s easy to miss the natural beauty around us. I certainly think that Peter’s photography has the power to inspire people to take time out and look at the world around them.

Peter’s landscape photos typically feature dramatic lighting and angles.

To view more of Peter Lik’s photos, check out his website - PeterLik.com.

Today is the anniversary of the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain.

At 11:30 a.m. local time on May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay from Nepal reached the summit of Mount Everest. The pair were part of a two pair expedition aiming to conquer the peak.

The first pair, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, came to within 100 meters of the summit when they had to turn back due to exhaustion. Their work wasn’t in vain though, as their route finding and trail breaking paved the way for the following pair. They also had extra caches of oxygen that came in handy.

Although the team had always maintained that it was a team effort, Tenzig later revealed that Hillary was the first to actually put his foot on the summit.

If you’re building or renovating, check out the new “Juicy Jute” wallcoverings by Architectural Textiles Ltd.

In fact, two new wallcoverings are available this year: Juicy Jute and Java Cork.

As well as the new wallcoverings, there are also wallcoverings made from hemp, silk, bamboo, raffia, and more.

The website allows you to view and order samples of different colors of each wallcovering.

As well as the environmental benefits of using materials like jute and hemp, these wallcoverings look very stylish too.

If you’re interested in seeing some beautiful photos of nature, check out the winning photos from the Rainforest Alliance’s Picture Sustainability Photo Contest.

The purpose of the photo contest was to raise awareness about conservation issues while allowing the Rainforest Alliance to expand its collection of photos for use in its publications and on its web site.

Winners were chosen from the following categories:

• Wildlife on farms, forests or other natural habitats
• Landscapes (forests, waterways, flowers and plants, beaches, wetlands)
• Eco-tourism in Latin America (bird watching, hiking, surfing, scuba diving, kayaking and other nature-based activities)
• Macro (a technique of close-up photography — here, applied to insects, flowers and plants, leafy vegetation, birds, reptiles and amphibians, mammals, textures)
• Conservation in action (people working to protect natural resources, including water, flora and fauna)

You can check out the photos here.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology that allows easy access to new information posted on website or blog. RSS is commonly used on blogs and it provides an easy way for blog visitors to view every new entry that’s posted.

What this means for you

If you’d like to receive regular updates from the Natural Environment Blog, RSS allows you to do so. There are two options for subscribing to the Natural Environment Blog:

• Option 1: Subscribe via RSS feed
• Option 2: Subscribe via Email

Here’s an explanation of these two options.

Option 1: RSS Feed

If you choose to subscribe via RSS feed, you need to get (or sign up with) an RSS reader. An RSS reader presents the contents of the feed in an easy-to-read way. It also allows you to add feeds from other websites/blogs too. This means that you can keep up to date with all your favorite websites from one place - the RSS reader.

Some readers are downloaded to your computer, others are accessed online. Examples of online RSS readers include Google Reader and Bloglines. MyYahoo, and Google Homepage (iGoogle) also allow you to incorporate RSS feeds into your homepage. When you click the Subscribe button, you’ll notice some icons for popular RSS readers, like this:

All you need to do is choose one, then sign up. If you already have an account (say, a Google or Yahoo! account), that will make it even easier - jut choose that option. If this sounds confusing, don’t despair - RSS readers are actually very easy to use. Once you start using one you’ll wonder why you hadn’t done so before!

The easiest way to learn about RSS subscriptions is to try it - subscribe to the Natural Environment Feed and follow the prompts.

Option 2: Subscribe via Email

If RSS subscriptions sounds like too much hard work, you can always subscribe via email. This option enables you to receive updates to your inbox. There’s not much more to it. You simply receive an email every day there’s a update on the Natural Environment Blog. You won’t receive more than one email per day. If there are multiple updates, they are all incorporated in the daily email.

If this options sounds better for you, try it now - go to the blog homepage and enter your email address into the field where it says “Or subscribe via email”.