As I type this, I am listening to the songs of several birds hopping and twittering (lowercase-t) among the branches of the Norway maple tree outside my office window. Tomorrow at this time, those birds will have to hop and twit somewhere else.  Because the tree will be gone–under my execution order. After much arborist-consulting…

I just spent 15 minutes standing perfectly still in the middle of my backyard. I had gone outside to push past the mid-day doldrums, breathe some fresh air, and inspect my two teeming raised-beds that are lush with lettuce, radishes, peas, spinach, Swiss chard, strawberries, potatoes, and onions.  But I wasn’t staring at the veg. …

The past few days have been exciting around here–I live in one of the 30 communities in and around Boston that were under a “boil water order” since a water main break late last week forced the city to divert water to an untreated reservoir.  This morning, after only 4 days, the water main was…

Trees rock. And apparently I’m not alone in this assessment of our green, leafy BFFs–here are some pro-tree quotes I’ve gathered in honor of Arbor Day 2010 (April 30th). (I culled some from ArborDay.org) Also, here’s a post I did a while back, How to Talk to a Tree (which garnered FL’s most vociferous comments ever. What’s…

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about

Valerie Reiss

Valerie Reiss is Holistic Living Editor at Beliefnet. She was a founding editor at Breathe magazine, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Women's Health, Natural Health, Yoga Journal, Lime.com, Vegetarian Times, and ABCNEWS.com. A native New Yorker, Valerie holds an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. from Beloit College in Creative Writing with a minor in Women's Studies. She also lived in Maui for a while where she drank green papaya juice and taught some creative writing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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