Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Environmentalism

3 Powerful Reasons to Plant Flowers

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Whether they’re in the ground, in window boxes, in pots, or in a vase on your living room table, there’s such a thing as flower power.

Often the way our environment looks gets pushed to the bottom of our to-do lists. Yes, it would be nice to add a little beauty to our homes or yards, but there are more practical things to take care of, such as procuring food and keeping the children alive. For that reason, flowers once ranked low on my gardening to-do list. But I’ve changed my mind, and here’s why.

Flowers are Healing
[clickToTweet tweet=”Flower power is real. Indoor flowers are linked with health, energy, happiness, and compassion.” quote=”Flower power is real. Indoor flowers are linked with health, energy, happiness, and compassion.” theme=”style1″]

In one study, people who have flowers in their living area reported less anxiety and worry, more energy and happiness at work, and more feelings of compassion toward others. In another study, surgical patients with flowers or potted plants in their environment had lower blood pressure and reported less need for pain medication, better moods, and less anxiety and tiredness than patients without flowers.

 

3 Powerful Reasons to Plant Flowers #gardening

Flowers Breed Biodiversity

Moreover, planting flowers is a small way to begin to change the devastating story of species loss.

What do flowers have to do with species loss?

We’re currently in a biodiversity crisis. (Biodiversity is the term scientists use to describe the abundant variety of life on Earth.) Alarmingly, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warns nearly a third of known species are threatened with extinction.

The culprit?

Us.

Especially our cities.

Urban sprawl is one of the leading causes of species endangerment; it contributes to the collapse of honey bee populations and the dramatic decline in Monarch butterfly colonies.

We need biodiversity. Plants and animals clean the air and water, create soil, pollinate crops, and recycle waste. It’s our life support system.

Feeling hopeless yet?

Don’t worry, I’m getting to the hopeful part.

A big part of the problem is that our cities are remarkably homogeneous. Ever wondered why nearly every city in the U.S. is covered in Kentucky bluegrass, even in the desert Southwest? We’ve transformed wide swaths of our country into relatively lifeless corridors, and pollinators have dwindling places to live, eat, and drink.

But we can make a difference. The Biodiversity in Urban Gardens (BUG) research project, a large-scale, eight-year British study, indicates what we plant in our yards and gardens can significantly impact the biodiversity of a city. By designing outdoor spaces to attract and accommodate birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other small animals, we can create safe corridors for wildlife and protect endangered species.

Biodiversity depends on bugs.

Insects are food for a large number of species, including amphibians, reptiles, rodents, spiders, and birds. Plus, insects are pollinators, so they’re necessary for plant biodiversity.

How do you feed and attract insects? First, put the pesticides away! Then, plant flowers!

That’s right, those very same lifeforms that are healing to us can turn a lifeless lawn into a humming, buzzing, biodiverse place of life.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t underestimate flowers. They’re powerful, healing, and essential for healthy ecosystems.” quote=”Don’t underestimate flowers. They’re powerful, healing, and essential for healthy ecosystems.” theme=”style1″]

Flowers Help Your Vegetable Garden Thrive

If you have a vegetable garden and you’re thinking the last thing you want to do is welcome more insects into your life, I can relate. But trust me, you want to plant flowers. Flowers have been shown to increase veggie yields and minimize pest damage because they attract beneficial pollinators and predators. In one study, farmers reduced cereal-leaf beetle damage in winter wheat fields by 62 percent by planting flower strips within rows of wheat. In another, farmers increased mango harvests by 40 percent when they planted native flowers nearby.

Flowers are Good for Everyone

When we plant flowers, everyone wins.

Humans have a disastrous track record when it comes to the environment, and it’s natural to feel paralyzed, grief-stricken, and angry about it.

Meanwhile, let’s plant flowers!

Welcoming biodiversity into yards and cities creates a welcoming space for all life.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. - Iris Murdoch #quote

If you liked this post check out these related posts:

Do you have a flower garden? What kind of insects and wildlife do you see in your yard?

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Happy Earth Day!

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In honor of the holiday, I’m posting a column my dad wrote for the April 21, 2011 Denver Post. I have a cameo appearance, and I love my dad’s hilarious and true take on how we should celebrate the day.

Replace Earth Day with Binge Day

By Ed Quillen
The Denver Post

Earth Day is Friday, and as a loyal resident of Earth, I want to celebrate properly.

I may have already found the wrong way to celebrate. In 2003, I was invited to speak at an Earth Day rally in Alamosa. Being rather immodest, I accepted.

But my 170-mile round-trip drive must have damaged the ozone layer or accelerated global warming or otherwise worsened whatever we were worried about eight years ago. The gathering in Cole Park was pleasant, but there were generators growling and smoking to provide electricity for the amplifiers. This didn’t strike me as especially Earth-friendly.

And when my stage turn came, I followed Peggy Godfrey of Moffat, who’s a cowboy poet or cowgirl poetess. However you describe her, she’s a great performer. I felt like the local garage band that somehow ended up appearing after the Rolling Stones. Peggy is a hard act to follow.

This was clearly not an appropriate Earth Day commemoration for me. But what would be?

To find out, I called the greenest person I know, my daughter Abby in Eugene, Ore. She has a big garden and keeps chickens. She and her husband, Aaron, don’t own a car; Aaron bicycles 12 miles each way to his teaching job. Abby’s always on the lookout for local foods and gentler ways to run her household — for instance, she washes her long brown hair with vinegar instead of commercial shampoo.

(I should point out that we did not raise Abby to turn out this way, as we had a car but no chickens. It’s a choice she made after graduating with honors from the University of Colorado Denver with a degree in history.)

“So how do you plan to celebrate Earth Day?” I asked Abby, expecting to hear that she’d be at a big rally in a downtown Eugene park.

“I know some people who are driving clear up to Vancouver, B.C., for an Earth Day festival.” She laughed at that irony. “But for us, it will be pretty much the same as any other day. I’ll feed the chickens, gather eggs, tend the garden, take Ezra (their 3-year-old son) for a walk, hope he naps long enough for me to get some writing done — what I do most days.”

Abby’s got the right idea here: If you care about the environment, forget about Earth Day trips and celebrations, and live simply every day. When you think about it, focusing on the environment once a year doesn’t make much sense, especially when that celebration often involves burning a lot of fuel.

But there does seem to be a basic human need for annual celebrations, and to that end I propose a yearly Binge Day.

On the other 364 days of the year, we would live simple green lives with local food and drink. We would walk, bicycle or ride public transit to get around. We would eschew gaudy imported novelties, fad electronics destined for quick obsolescence and other trashy food, goods and geegaws.

In other words, we would live prudently and sensibly, following adages like “Waste not, want not.” The global economy might contract on that account, but it seems to be doing that anyway.

On Binge Day, though, we could pig out on champagne and corn-fed prime rib. We’d rent a Hummer or an Escalade to drive to the shopping mall for an orgy of conspicuous consumption. We’d ignore the recycling bins and just toss our abundant trash in a barrel. And after the once-a-year Binge Day blowout, we’d go back to living sensibly.

Add it up, and Binge Day should be about 364 times better for the environment than Earth Day.

I’m editing an anthology of my dad’s columns. To find out more about it, visit edquillen.com. How are you celebrating Earth Day? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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Becoming Carcinogen Abolitionists

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“I look back on the life of Abraham Lincoln, whose portrait hangs in every schoolroom in Illinois, and marvel that our economy was once dependent on slave labor. Unthinkable. I believe our grandchildren will look back on us and marvel that our economy was once dependent on chemicals that were killing the planet and killing ourselves.” – Sandra Steingraber

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Living Downstream, a documentary based on the life and research of Sandra Steingraber. Steingraber, a biologist and author, was diagnosed with bladder cancer at 20 and believes she is part of a cancer cluster in her hometown in Tazewell County, Illinois, where “three dozen different industries line the river valley and farmers practice chemically intensive agriculture along its floodplains.”

After Steingraber was diagnosed with cancer, her doctors told her it was a fluke. But when she consulted the scientific literature, she discovered that bladder cancer is “considered a quintessential environmental cancer, meaning that we have more evidence for a link between toxic chemical exposures and bladder cancer risk than for almost any other kind of cancer.” For instance scientists had known for decades that certain textile dyes cause bladder cancer in humans. Not only are these dyes still in use, they are present in the groundwater of Steingraber’s hometown.”The disconnect between what we in the scientific community know about carcinogens and what cancer patients are told is huge,” Steingraber says.

In the next thirty years, Steingraber went on to become a cancer survivor, receive her PhD, write several popular books and dozens of articles, and speak all over the world. She became a passionate “carcinogen abolitionist.”

I’ve long admired Steingraber’s writing in Orion, and her message is resonating with me more than ever right now for a variety of reasons. Despite Richard Nixon famously declaring war on cancer in 1971, cancer is on the rise. Recently my sister-in-law and several friends have been diagnosed with cancer in their early forties.

Where I live in Eugene, researchers have identified two cancer clusters – an elevated rate of leukemia around the Baxter creosote factory and elevated numbers of lung cancer cases near the Union Pacific railroad yards. These two neighborhoods have something in common with the Illinois county where Steingraber grew up: they’re populated by low-income people. I’ve known two families who lived near the Baxter plant. Both complained about fumes that kept them awake at night. The Oregon Toxics Alliance was started, because children at a school in the Baxter neighborhood were crying and begging to come inside from recess because of plumes of noxious gases in the air.  I’m convinced that no one, regardless of income, should be forced to breathe toxic chemicals.

Moreover, over the last two years, I’ve embarked on a personal project that’s made me reflect on our society’s reliance on synthetic chemicals. I replaced shampoo, conditioner, cosmetics, bug sprays, and cleaning products with simple, cheap, nontoxic ingredients (baking soda and vinegar, in most cases), eliminating the majority of toxic chemicals from my home. What surprised me the most about the process? The simple ingredients work better.

That’s right, those products I once used, which are loaded with questionable ingredients, are unnecessary. Yet the majority of people continue to use them. The average home contains 62 toxic chemicals. Why? Advertising? Lobbying? They don’t know about the alternatives? Could those things also partly explain the reliance on chemicals by industrial agriculture, forestry, landscape management, etc.? Maybe. For instance we often hear that chemical-intensive farming methods are a necessary evil if we want to feed the ballooning world population. But on the contrary, a U.N. report released in March reveals that by switching to small-scale, sustainable agriculture, we could not only feed the world, we could double food production.

The widespread commercial use of numerous synthetic chemicals is a recent phenomenon culminating after World War II. Babies born in the 1950s were the first generation of newborns exposed to multiple synthetic chemicals in the womb. In other words, it is a grand experiment, one that I’m increasingly convinced is failing.

Steingraber is a powerful advocate for eliminating the chemicals linked to cancer, early puberty, miscarriages, and birth defects. She’s a talented writer and one of the most moving speakers I’ve ever heard. Yet, I’ve noticed that many people have a hard time embracing her message.

When I excitedly told a friend about the showing of Living Downstream and showed him the above trailer, he reacted the way I think many people do. He said, “You’re going to watch that? It looks really depressing.”

Then I posted the movie trailer on Facebook, and someone wrote. “Great, now I have to stop drinking water and breathing.”

I can relate to these sentiments. My generation has been bombarded with environmental fears since we were born. Every nature video and discussion in grade school invariably ended with human-wrought devastation – the diminishing ozone layer, acid rain, rapidly-growing endangered species and extinction lists. By the time I was in high school, the word carcinogen meant little to me. When our teachers and parents lectured us that cigarettes were carcinogens, my friends and I shrugged. What wasn’t a carcinogen – from the water we drank to the sun we depended on for life?

So I understand why many of us might feel environmentally-fatigued and why Steingraber’s call for us to become carcinogen abolitionists could be falling on deaf ears. We tend to want a checklist of things we can do to protect ourselves and our kids from disease – eat organic, exercise, replace our household cleaners, avoid tobacco, breastfeed, eat less animal fat. Steingraber advocates all of the above, but she also makes it clear that we can not do this on our own.

“I am a conscientious parent. I am not a HEPA filter. If organophosphate pesticides are damaging children’s brains at background levels of exposure and above, they should be abolished,” she writes.

She is convinced that we have to join together, we have to speak out, we have to contact our representatives, we have to support organizations like the Oregon Toxics Alliance. We have to unify against some of the most powerful industries in the country and rebuild our society and economy. That’s not an easy message.

Yet I find it hopeful. Remember the eco-problems we kids were bombarded with in the eighties – acid rain, the ozone layer, lead poisoning? We tackled those. The EPA’s Acid Rain Program forced factories and automobiles to reduce emissions, helping to improve the pH of precipitation. Developed countries phased out ozone-depleting substances, and evidence suggests the ozone layer is regenerating. Laws banning the use of lead in house paint and gasoline mean that kids have six times less lead in their bodies than they did 30 years ago. How did we accomplish these environmental successes? By addressing the problems and working together to solve them. I hope Steingraber is right and we can also become carcinogen abolitionists.

I am betting that my children—and the generation of children they are a part of—will, by the time they are my age, consider it unthinkable to allow cancer-causing chemicals, reproductive toxicants, and brain-destroying poisons to freely circulate in our economy. They will find it unthinkable to assume an attitude of silence and willful ignorance about our ecology.

Wishful or not, I am determined to win this bet because my children’s lives are inextricably bound to the abiding ecology of this planet, which is worth everything I could possibly wager. An environmental human rights movement is the vision under which I labor, from which I am not free to desist, and which may, if we all work together, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Want to learn more about Sandra Steingraber and her work? Check out her website or the following:

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10 Aha Moments in 2010

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You know that feeling you get when someone says or writes something far better than you could have? I love that feeling. Here are 10 of the more memorable times it happened to me in 2010:

When anthropologists spend time with aboriginal peoples, one of the very first things they almost always comment on is that these are folks who spend so much time with their loved ones that they almost have no concept of privacy the way we do. I tend to think that is the default setting for the human brain and human psyche. I believe it’s time that we start living as Americans as if relationships are the things that matter to us the most, not  our achievement, not our possessions, not our money. – Dr. Stephen S. Ilardi

Frugality is not the same thing as cheapness … Frugality is the exact opposite. Frugality is an embracing of quality. It’s an embracing of experiences. It’s really trying to look at, what are we spending our money on? Why are we spending this money? – Chris Farrell

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. – Rebecca Solnit

What’s really sad to me is not that people don’t send their kids out to play [anymore]. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about: get up in the morning, walk out the door, say, “Bye Mom,” and don’t come back ‘til dinnertime. And your mom has no idea where you are, or who you’re hanging out with, or what you’re doing. It’s just not an issue. That’s the kind of freedom we’re talking about. And what’s sad is not just that my kids don’t get that, that I don’t let them do that, that I don’t feel like it’s possible anymore somehow, but if I did … and when we do send our kids outside, there’s no one out there to play with. They’re just in this deserted moonscape, where something terrible happened to all the children, and they’ve been taken away. Where are they all? They’re all inside. It’s not right, and I think we know it’s not right, and I think it’s a persistent source of guilt for parents. – Michael Chabon

Whatever work I am doing –  editing a magazine or lecturing or whatever other work I am doing – I never hurry. … I say, there’s plenty of time. I don’t feel any kind of stress or strain when I do something. I do slowly, and I do with love and with care, and that way I can live a simple and slow life. I do only one thing at a time, and when I’m doing that thing, I do only that thing. – Satish Kumar

Somewhere along the line, I had stopped believing the evidence that was before me and started believing one of the central myths of modern American culture: that a family requires a pile of money just to survive in some sort of comfort and that “his and her” dual careers were an improvement over times past. – Shannon Hayes

I’m critical of these focuses on individual lifestyle changes, you know it’s our fault that there’s global warming because we didn’t ride our bike, or we didn’t recycle, or we didn’t carry our own bag to the store. Of course I think we should do all those things and we should definitely strive to live as low impact as possible. But we’re operating within a system where the current is moving us toward greater ecological devastation. So these individual actions that we can do, it’s kind of like getting better and better at swimming upstream. …. Rather than nagging our friends to take public transportation even if it takes five times as long and costs twice as much money, let’s work together to get better public transportation, so that the more ecological action is the new default. We need to make doing the right thing as easy as falling off a log… – Annie Leonard

We are so used to being in our metal-and-glass boxes that we forget how wonderful the rain is. And when the weather is good, cars isolate you from that. You don’t get to feel the sun on your shoulders, the wind in your face, the fresh smell of licorice when you pass a certain plant, see the squirrels dart past or the ducks mock you with their quack. – Leo Babauta

This is an increasingly noisy era — people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. – Margaret J. Wheatley

Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief. … Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think and distance from normal demands. I got to stop. – Mark Bittman

* Don’t forget, tomorrow is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. The solstice this year coincides with a full moon – a rare event. (The next time it will happen is on December 21, 2094.) And this year there will also be a total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice starting at 1:33 A.M. eastern standard time. It’s a special day for so many reasons. You can find simple ways to celebrate here.

Who or what inspired you this year?

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