THE GREEN ZONE BLOG by LINDA MASON HUNTER
All about taking care of yourself, your family, and the planet, "The Green Zone" offers short, basic tips to incorporate into your daily life to make Earth a cleaner, more sustainable place.
In the Zone
"The Green Zone" airs four times daily at approximately. 2:50 a.m., 6:50 a.m., 4:50 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. central time. Listen every day for a new tip you can put to good use.
Just a little bit…
December, 2024
It’s just a little bit of chlorine in your water.
It’s just a little bit of heavy metals in your food.
It’s just a little bit of fragrance in your cologne.
It’s just a little bit of benzene in your sunscreen.
It’s just a little bit of aluminum in your deodorant.
It’s just a little bit of PFOAs in your nonstick pans.
It’s just a little bit of phthalates in your plastic storage bags.
It’s just a little bit of methanol in your surface cleaner.
It’s just a little bit of artificial coloring in your toothpaste.
It’s just a little bit of ammonia in your sugar-free sweetener.
It’s just a little bit of propylene glycol in your skincare products.
It’s just a little bit of sodium lauryl sulfate in your shampoo.
It’s just a little bit of glyphosate in your breakfast cereal.
It’s just a little bit of “forever chemicals” in your plastic bottles.
It’s just a little bit of fluoride in your drinking water.
It’s just a little bit of parabens in your moisturizer.
Hmmmm. Let me ask you this: When does “just a little bit” become too much for the body to handle?
Focus!
By Linda Mason Hunter
February, 2025
I just finished reading a relevant book I wish everyone would read. It’s called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, and How to Think Deeply Again, byJohann Hari. Its main premise is that our ability to pay attention is collapsing. In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only 65 seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes.
In doing research for this book, Hari discovered a basic scientific fact: The human brain can only focus on one thing at a time. It’s simply not humanly possible to focus on two things at once. So, when, for example, you are trying to write a coherent sentence (as I am now) and you get a ping on your phone, or when you start switching from device to device, from tab to tab, your attention diminishes, you get frustrated, the quality of your work suffers. When this occurs all day, day after day, it re-routes the synapses in your brain. Pretty soon, you find it impossible to think deeply at all. Your brain is frazzeled. You realize you don’t have some of the pleasure in life you used to have.
This is happening to us on a global scale. The world is speeding up, and that process is shrinking our collective attention span. Social media is a major accelerant. As our world experience gets faster and faster, we have been focusing on any one topic less and less.
Hari lays the root of the problem squarely on economic growth—the belief that the economy, and each individual company in it, should get bigger and bigger. That’s how we define success. Corporations need to find new markets by inventing something new. In this way corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time.
Hari believes we should abandon economic growth as the driving principle of the economy and instead choose a different set of goals. We could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life—they want a good life.
It’s a crisis for the human species, but there are solutions. Hari explains what they are in this book. If we achieve these goals, the ability of people to pay attention would, over time, dramatically improve. Then we will have a solid core of focus that we could use to take the fight for a better world further and deeper.
It’s worth your time to read this book.
We Are All Connected
February, 2025
Since childhood I’ve been a student of indigenous spiritual philosophy, especially their view of the Earth and all its inhabitants. I find this statement by Floyd Red Crow Westerman especially inspiring today.
Floyd Red Crow Westerman
We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense, America is dying from within because it forgot the instructions on how to live on earth. It’s the Hopi belief, it’s our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, it’s likely that you will not make it.
Everything is spiritual. Everything has a spirit.
Everything was brought here by the Creator, the one Creator.
Some people call him God. Some people call him Buddha.
Some people call him Allah. Some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila...Grandfather.
We are here on earth only a few winters. Then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real than most of us believe.
The spirit world is everything. Over 95% of our body is water.
To stay healthy, you’ve got to drink good water. Water is sacred. The air is sacred. Our DNA is made out of the same DNA as the tree. The tree breathes what we exhale. We need what the tree exhales. So we have a common destiny with the tree.
We are all from the earth, and when the earth, water, and atmosphere are corrupted, it will create its own reaction. Our Mother is reacting.
The Hopi prophecy says that storms and floods will become greater. To me, it’s not a negative thing to know that there will be great changes. It’s not negative. it’s evolution. When you look at it as evolution, it’s time.
Nothing stays the same. You should learn how to plant something. That is the first connection.
You should treat everything as spirit and realize that we are one family. It’s never something like the end. It’s like life.
There is no end to life.
We are all connected; we all belong.
-- Floyd Red Crow Westerman (1936 – 2007), Sisseton Dakota musician, political activist, and actor.
Getting By, Getting Along
By Linda Mason Hunter
January, 2025
Today, with our country—and indeed the world--on the precipice of radical change, and so many suffering from life changes they didn’t anticipate, it’s often difficult to find happiness, not to mention contentment. Everywhere I go, everyone I talk to is asking the same question: what can I do to make the world a better place?
When life as we knew it yesterday is not the same today, it’s not an easy question to answer. But one thing each one of us can do to make our little corner of the world a better place is to engage in the simple practice of treating others as you want to be treated. What is known as the Golden Rule, an age-old tenet that is the first principle of every religion.
· In the Christian faith it’s “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
· In Islam, it’s "None of you believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”
· Jewish and Buddhist interpretations are similar: "What is hateful unto you do not unto others."
It’s a simple common morality. But if religious teachings are not your thing, perhaps this quote from Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, will be more to your liking:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
