How One Woman and Her Nonprofit Are Saving Our Forests #WATWB

We are the World Bloghop seeks to share uplifting, good news with the world on the final Friday of each month. Special thanks to our fabulous co-hosts for September: Eric Lahti, Inderpreet Uppal, Shilpa Garg, Sylvia Stein,and  Peter Nena.

Searching for good news today to post for the We Are The World Blogpost (WATWB), I found tons of heartwarming, inspirational articles. However, when I came across an article about Alana Young, who started a non-profit in hopes of helping Mother Earth survive, I was simply  blown away.

Young is all about saving our environment, in particular old growth forests. In 2011, this Columbia University ecology student, overwhelmed and feeling empty because of the earth’s disintegrating health–climate warming, tons of trash, mass extinctions–created an environmental nonprofit called For the Wild. She felt like she had no way of voicing her distress until she witnessed the anti-consumerist, pro-environmental protestors in Zuccotti Park in New York City.  They put words to what she was feeling. At last, she was in a community that was talking about the things she’d been struggling with for so long.

She became an incensed and passionate advocate, diving deeply into everything about the environment and its plight. The biggest detriment to our earth’s health, she felt, was human supremacy. She asks, “Why are humans entitled to all the resources in the world?”

Young’s nonprofit  is “a love song to disappearing wild places.” It merges restoration and conservation efforts with storytelling and education. There are localized ground projects, like the 1 Million Redwoods Project, a hands-in-the-dirt collective effort to renew and protect North America’s Cascadia bioregion—a swath of forest land running along the Pacific coast from Northern California to south-central Alaska. And there are wide-reaching media efforts, including the For the Wild podcast, which has evolved into a platform for critical discourse and coalition-building among people committed to social justice, wilderness conservation, and ecological renewal. “It keeps us focused on supporting the front line communities that are the heroes of the regenerative movement,” Young says.

How can we protect what she refers to as “the living libraries of our forests and biodiversity?” Young speaks with clarity, urgency, and humility about ways to honor and sustain our bioregions. “I see what’s happening on a mass scale,” she says. “I don’t have all the answers. Maybe I don’t have any. What I do have are commitment, focus, attention, resources, and love.”

Me thinks she does have some answer. Reading about her work puts me in mind of a Big Island wildlife refuge where I visited a rain forest helped along by biologists and volunteers. The sweet rarefied air, the birds singing and flying through the tall trees, the lush forest, the misty rain enchanted me, made me want to stay. Thank you, Alana Young, for helping our Mother Earth.

Check out the URL: https://goop.com/wellness/food-planet/how-one-woman-and-her-nonprofit-are-saving-our-forests/

BTW, you can also check out this post on https://www.facebook.com/1340888285958297/posts/1918001948246925/