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Top Five New Year’s Resolutions for an Uber Healthy Year

March's balancing act
March’s balancing act by lululemon athletica

Making New Year’s resolutions is a great way to plan for success in the new year. Some people may decide to travel to at least 3 countries or pick up gardening as a hobby ;-), while others will wish to play an instrument or try wind surfing. These are fantastic ideas, but my question is this: if you don’t have the energy and motivation to do any of them, what is the point? This is why I am writing these New Year’s resolutions with strength and radian health in mind. It’s actually really simple to have healthy body and clear mind, but it might require changing a few rusty habits.

In fact, healthy people and healthy Earth are not separate, they are part of the same goal. One cannot exist without the other. With Permaculture we strive to create systems that are efficient, sustainable and beneficial to humans, while nurturing the landscapes. I would extend this definition to aiming to create the healthiest and most lucid people on Earth. When we focus our minds on treating ourselves with love and care, it is inevitable that we will want to be surrounded by an environment of health and balance. The opposite is also true. It’s hard to feel low in a vibrant garden of beauty and absolute abundance.

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Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index (VIDEO on TED)

Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation’s success by its productivity – instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn’t have to cost the Earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.

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Community Get PermaCultured Organizations

The Rhizome Collective: Autonomous Sustainability Demonstration

rhizome urbsustRhizome:
An expanding underground root system, sending up above ground shoots to form a vast network. Difficult to uproot.

The Rhizome Collective is a non-profit organization based out of a warehouse on the East Side of Austin, Texas. The Rhizome Collective operates an Educational Center for Urban Sustainability and a Center for Community Organizing. They are a consensus-run organization.

Rhizome’s purpose is the design and display of functioning ecological tools and technologies, created to give communities greater self-reliance over life’s basic resources: water, food, energy production, waste management, shelter and remediation of toxins. By having this systems open for the public to learn from and interact with, they hope to educate and inspire others to continue the work of building locally based, decentralized, radically sustainable infrastructures. By doing so, they hope to ease humanity’s transition into a post-petroleum future, and simultaneously undermine oppressive powers that maintain resource monopolies.

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Community Get Started

Encyclopedia of Life: like Wikipedia, but for living things

EOL Home Page

The Encyclopedia of Life is an unprecedented global partnership between the scientific community and the general public. Our goal is to make freely available to anyone knowledge about all the world’s organisms. Anybody can register as an EOL member and add text, images, videos, comments or tags to EOL pages. Expert curators ensure quality of the core collection by authenticating materials submitted by diverse projects and individual contributors. Together we can make EOL the best, most comprehensive source for biodiversity information.