Huffington Post Wrote:The Benefits Of Positive News Ripple Far Beyond The First Smile
But just three minutes of negative news leaves you 27 percent more likely to have a bad day.
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YES! Magazine Wrote:Meet the Jeans-Wearing, Nature-Loving Nuns Who Helped Stop a Kentucky Pipeline

As fewer women enter the convent, what will become of Kentucky’s tradition of socially and environmentally engaged religious women?

Laura Michele Diener posted Apr 07, 2016

“The easiest way for me to find God is in nature,” Sister Ceciliana Skees explains. Born Ruth Skees, she grew up in Hardin County, Kentucky, during the 1930s. It’s a rural place of soft green hills, where her father farmed his entire life.

Now just a few months shy of her eighty-fifth birthday, she remembers feeling the first stirrings of a religious calling at the age of 10. Her peasant blouse and smooth, chin-length haircut don’t fit the popular image of a nun, but she has been a Sister of Loretto—a member of a religious order more than 200 years old—since she took vows at the age of 18.

Skees’ commitment to social activism goes back almost as far as her commitment to the church. She has marched for civil rights, founded a school for early childhood education, and taught generations of children.

Then, a few years ago, she heard about the Bluegrass Pipeline, a joint venture between two energy companies: Williams and Boardwalk Pipeline Partners. The project would have transported natural gas liquids from fracking fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio southwest across Kentucky to connect with an existing pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico. Loretto’s land was directly in its path.

On August 8, 2013, Skees and other sisters from Loretto and several other convents attended an informational meeting held by representatives of the two companies. Frustrated with what they saw as a lack of helpful information, several of the sisters, including Skees, gathered in the center of the room and broke into song. A video of the sisters singing “Amazing Grace” was picked up by media outlets such as Mother Jones and reached hundreds of thousands of people.

David Korten Wrote:The current demand for deep change corresponds to an emerging third stage in humanity’s awakening environmental consciousness.

1. The first stage, provoked by the publication of Silent Spring, focused attention on the impact of industrial toxins on the health of humans and other animals.

2. The second stage, spurred by the image of Earth in space and MIT’s “The Limits to Growth,” introduced a planetary systems perspective.

3. The third stage features the voices of indigenous people whose traditions have long honored Earth as our living mother, of scientists who speak of Earth as a living superorganism that self-organizes to maintain the environmental conditions essential to life, and of religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, who opened his “Care of the Earth” encyclical with a reference to Mother Earth.

Those of us who succumbed to the false promises of Western consumerism at great cost to our Earth mother, our living Earth family, and ourselves, are Earth’s prodigal children now returning home.

We have only begun, however, to confront the implications for how we must now learn to live. This Earth Day let us share and celebrate the possibilities.

Paul Hawken Wrote:Blessed Unrest
How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being
and Why No One Saw it Coming

A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change

Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice.
From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.

Quote:The Optimist (formerly Ode magazine) is an independent media initiative focused on solutions and possibility. We are committed to solutions journalism. We point the way to answers for the challenges humanity and the planet face. We offer news that's actually new. We present intelligent optimism as the most effective, efficient—and scientifically proven—strategy to support creativity, innovation, health and happiness.