In summarizing irradiated food, the author Amanda states, “So what you get with irradiation is weird-looking, off-tasting food, with fewer nutrients and a larger environmental impact, that costs significantly more than fresh food. Oh, and it might kill you.” What is the solution? Seek out locally grown, organic produce and animal products and be especially wary of anything labeled pasteurized.

Author: Cindy Heller

Setting up backyard gardens is the surest way to invite butterflies into your home. If you happen to have a big space at the back of your home, it would be a good idea for you and your family to start planning for your backyard gardens. Buy some books and magazines about backyard gardens to help you and your family to design your gardens in such a way that it will look inviting to different species of butterflies.

Designing Your Backyard Gardens
There are many things that you need to consider when designing your backyard garden. First, you need to take into consideration the present condition of your backyard. If you backyard already have existing plants, you need to take an inventory of the plants and decide which ones you are going to keep and which ones have to go.

The second thing that you need to consider when designing your backyard garden is your budget. You need to ask yourself how you can afford to spend on your backyard garden. To know how much money you can spare for your garden, check your monthly income and savings against your usual monthly expenses. Make sure that you do not drain your finances just to make your backyard garden look beautiful. Yes, a beautiful backyard garden is important but you don’t really have to go broke just to create a lovely picture at the back of your home.

The third thing that you need to consider when designing your backyard garden is the type of plant that you need. If you want to invite butterflies into your garden, you need to use plants that are attractive to butterflies. Some plants that are attractive to butterflies are milkweed, aspen, chokecherry, dill, parsley, marigold, aster, lilac, cottonwood, pansy, clover and others. To attract a variety of butterflies into your backyard, try planning different types of plants. Add native plants into your list of planting materials. Native plants are good at attracting species of butterflies that are endemic in your area.

“Butterfly gardens can be any size - a window box, part of your landscaped yard, or even a wild untended area on your property. When planning your butterfly garden, the following pointers will help. Learn the common butterfly species in your vicinity and include both their adult nectar plants and caterpillar food plants in the garden. Adult butterflies will visit for a longer period if they find plants to lay their eggs on.” Butterfly–garden.com

Nothing signals the coming of spring more than butterflies flitting through your yard. Watching them waltz from flower to flower can bring endless pleasure. If you want to entice more of these colorful guests to your yard, consider planting a butterfly garden. A butterfly garden that is planned and planted correctly will bring a wide variety of butterflies to your yard year after year.

Butterfly Gardens Are Diverse
There are many types of butterflies in the world and each type prefers specific flowers to gain nutrients, lay their eggs, and feed their young. If you want your butterfly garden to attract many different kinds of butterflies, make sure that you plant many different kinds of flowers. Scientists aren’t sure why, but they have found that certain color butterflies prefer certain kinds of plants. Perhaps they are drawn to like colors for their camouflaging abilities or perhaps certain colored plants taste better to them than others. Whatever the reason, you will see many different butterflies in you butterfly garden, if you plant many different plants.

Some wonderful plants to include in butterfly gardens are coneflower, blackeyed susan, marigolds, butterfly bush, lantana, hibiscus, verbena, lilacs, lavender, and rosemary.

Butterfly Gardens Provide Shelter
There are butterfly predators in your neighborhood and as a result, butterfly gardens should contain suitable shelters for your winged friends. A butterfly hutch is the perfect safe resting place for the butterflies in your garden. You can purchase one at a local nursery or even make one yourself. You can leave it plain or decorate it in a whimsical fashion. The main things to look for in a good butterfly hutch are slits that are big enough to let the butterflies in but too small for nasty predators to gain access and an interior that contains pieces of bark for the butterfly to nest on.

Butterfly Gardens Give Nourishment

If you want a butterfly garden that will attract many butterflies and nourish your soul make sure you provide food and water for the many butterflies that will descend on your yard. Many of the flowers you plant will provide nectar for your butterflies, but you can also help nature along by providing feeders full of sugar water. You can even leave out little bits of sugar water in saucers scattered around your plants or place a piece of over ripe fruit in your garden to attract many butterflies. Butterflies also need water, so placing a small birdbath in your garden is a great idea.

“Butterfly gardens are a great source for your own enjoyment, photo opportunities, or an outlet for artistic talent. These gardens can also be extended to interest youth in nature, by providing a small window of native inhabitants of the local environment. On a final note, it’s important to conserve butterflies when possible since their habitat is constantly diminishing due to the increasing needs and consequent development of roads and housing.” How to Make Butterfly Gardens

About the author:
Cindy Heller is a professional writer. Visit one stop gardens to learn more about flowers and gardens for preschool children and other gardens with flowers

According to the article, “EWG pet health study spurs launch of new organization” at Enviroblog, “They found 48 of the 70 chemicals they looked for, including PCBs, PBDEs, phthalates, and heavy metals, and lots of other stuff.”

Our pets seem to absorb the toxins the same way we do, through air, water and food pollution.

Visit Enviroblog or Pets for the Environment to learn more

The slideshow includes information about modern fishing practices including bottom trawling. You may not think bottom trawling is a big deal until you read that they are destroying over 6 million square miles of ocean floor every year. The fisherman don’t use a fraction of the marine life they destroy, they simply decimate an entire ecosystem and move on to the next location. The sealife that they do not keep is called bycatch and thrown back into the ocean dead or on the verge of death. Trawling is not the only harmful fishing practice. There are many other large scale practices that cause irreparable harm to marine life and our oceans.

You can do your part by not supporting environment destroying fishing outfits. Either go vegetarian or seek out certified sustainable fish such as Wild Alaskan Salmon. You will be speaking out with your wallet and enjoying a substantially healthier fish as well.

Watch the slideshow on PBS.

“We haven’t yet learned how to factor the health of the environment into our economic paradigm. We need to get to work on this calculus quickly, for a stock market crash will pale by comparison to an ecological crash on an oceanic scale.” Charles Moore

Did you know that there is a body of garbage floating in the Pacific the size of a continent? Unless you read a lot of “green“, there is a shockingly good chance that you have not heard of the North Pacific Gyre. Circular currents around the center of the gyre collect flotsam and garbage floating in our waters and deposit it permanently on the pile, building it into a larger and larger mass. This was not a problem prior to the development of plastics because everything deposited in the gyre was biodegradable and it eventually decomposed.

“Because of the stability of this gentle maelstrom, the largest uniform climatic feature on Earth is also an accumulator of the debris of civilization. Anything that floats, no matter where it comes from on the north Pacific Rim or ocean, ends up here, sometimes after drifting around the periphery for 12 years or more.” Mindfully.org

Image: The North Pacific Gyre: A Plastic Hurricane

This great, floating garbage patch also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex is composed almost entirely of plastic. This is no tiny garbage patch either. It is the size of Africa. Ten million square miles. It is literally a continent of garbage. Experts say that it would be easier to vacuum up every square inch of the United States than to simply vacuum up the gyre.

What is causing it?

“The plastic is coming from both inadvertent and intentional dumping of debris in the ocean (or in rivers that eventually run to the ocean). According to AMRF, even we in land-locked areas are part of the problem since land-based sources contribute 80% of marine debris.

In addition to the usual assortment of junk you might expect – plastic bags, pieces of plastic lighters, plastic bottle caps—Captain Moore found the bulk of waste to be “nurdles,” tiny plastic pellets used by industry in the production of everything from CDs to plastic pipe. Nurdles find their way from manufacturing plants into the stomachs of marine life who mistake it for food.” - Ecocycle.org

Why is it a problem?
OK, so what if human beings have created a toxic, virtually indestructible product that is taking over our environment? It is in the middle of the Pacific, right? Not true. Plastics are gradually destroying the ecosystem. Birds are dying from starvation and dehydration because their stomachs are filled with indigestible plastics. Jellyfish, seals and other marine life live in danger of getting caught in discarded plastic fishing nets. Albatross mistake plastic toys, lighters and Legos for food and feed them to their young chicks. Animals are dying and it is our fault.

If that isn’t bad enough that we are endangering and killing sea life in the Pacific, we are polluting them as well. As it turns out, these animals are becoming even more polluted because the plastic they are ingesting are sponges for toxins such as DDT, PCBs and nonylphenols. Thus the toxins become part of the food chain, eventually ending up in human beings.

What are the Solutions?
This floating garbage dump cannot be cleaned up. It is simply too large, prohibitively expensive and there is life existing within this enormous pile of trash that cannot be extricated. The “solution”, if you can call it that, it to stop contributing to the pile of garbage.

Yes people, even if you live in Michigan you are contributing to a monumental problem in the Pacific ocean if you use plastic products. Sorry, you don’t get a landlocked pass. Rivers carry plastics to the ocean. The corporations that manufacture the plastics you use are dumping their waste in the ocean. The fisherman who caught the fish that you ultimately bought from Walmart dumped their lines in the ocean to avoid fees on land. You are responsible whether you like it or not. So here are a few simple suggestions of how you can get some plastic out of your life:

Stop buying plastic stuff that you don’t need
Forgo the toy at McDonalds, use a water filter rather than bottles and lighten up on your personal care products.

Use a natural alternative to plastic when possible
Use glass bowls and instead of plastic, matches instead of lighters, wooden toys instead of cheap, plastic ones and reusable grocery bags instead of those horrible, ubiquitous plastic nightmares.

You must recycle and compost
Its just not that difficult to recycle. Just do it. Make it a point to never, ever throw away plastic. An even better solution is to purchase biodegradable and compostable plastic alternatives and throw them in your composting bin. Composting is a bit more work than recycling but it basically eliminates the garbage entirely and you can add it to your lawn or garden.

“Past studies have shown that less than 5% of plastic ever gets recycled and each American disposes of roughly 65 lbs. of plastic each year.” Triplepundit.com

Be aware
If you are not interested in going vegan to avoid contributing to unscrupulous fishing practices, then simply go out of your way to try to find the source of your fish. Look for products that are wild caught and sustainable. Thank goodness corporations are beginning to understand the impact of their waste products and some are beginning to clean up their plastic pellets (nurdles). We will not see the removal of this great garbage dump in our lifetimes but perhaps our granchildren will see the results of our efforts.

If you are interested in the state of our oceans, you simply must watch Altered Oceans

“The USDA issued the largest beef recall in history Feb. 17 after the Humane Society released undercover video showing workers at Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. shoving sick or crippled cows with forklifts to get them to stand. The video also showed workers dragging sick cows with chains, shocking them with electric prods and shooting streams of water in their noses and faces. The lawsuit says the workers were trying to get the animals to stand, even briefly, so they could be considered acceptable for human consumption.” Foxnews.com

This is about more than the quality of meat that we eat. It is about how we as a society are treating our animal friends. The meat industry is an appalling example of our disconnect and callousness toward animals. The same people who adore their cats and dogs are perfectly willing to eat the meat of an animal tortured on its path to slaughter.

Even if Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer manages to reduce the torture with spot checks (rather than security cameras), we still have the issue of why the cows are sick and crippled to begin with. It is very simple. They are being fed a very unnatural diet of grain, fermented feed, antibiotics and hormones. Free range, grass fed cows are quite literally a totally different animal.

“Before factory farming took hold in the 1960’s……….meat was free of antibiotics, added hormones, feed additives, flavor enhancers, age-delaying gases and salt-water solutions. Mad cow disease and the deadliest strain of E. coli — 0157:H7 — did not exist. People dined on rare steaks and steak tartare (raw ground beef) with little fear.” Motherearthnews.com

Eating supermarket beef is not only supporting blatant cruelty to animals, but the stuff you are putting in your mouth cannot be called food. It is disgusting. The easiest way that you can do your part to end this needless suffering is to go vegan or vegetarian. If that is not an option at this time for you or your family, then please seek out grass fed beef for both the well being of the livestock and for the well being of your family.

Buy the Book: Pasture Perfect by Jo Robinson