For me, shopping for clothes is a turn-off.  I find the racks and racks of dresses, blouses, and skirts depressing.  Then there are the piles of sweaters, scarves, belts, and socks, rows upon rows of shoes and boots.  How can stores sell all this stuff, I wonder.  Overwhelmed and grumpy, I ask myself if we really need all this stuff.  

     Clothing has a big impact on the planet.  For example, the growing of cotton, the most commonly used clothing material, requires vast amounts of water and pesticides.  The clothing manufacturing process itself involves many toxic substances.  Then there is the sheer volume of clothing manufactured and sold every year.

     It seems that many of us buy far more clothes than we need.  According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year.  And only about 15% of discarded clothing is recycled, according to the Council for Textile Recycling.

     One way to recycle unwanted clothing is to donate it to Goodwill, or to a local second-hand clothing store.  But only one-fifth of clothing donated to charities is directly sold, according to Pietra Rivoli, professor of international business at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.  “There are nowhere enough people in America to absorb the mountains of castoffs, even if they were given away,” she says.

     I know what Rivoli means.  The first time I walked into the Mount Jackson (Virginia) Thrift Store, I was shocked.  The place was jammed with clothing–dresses, bathrobes, and shirts pressed tightly together on the racks, hardly enough space to walk between the racks, and bags of unpacked donations piled into the corners.  Volunteers could not process new donations fast enough.  There was just too much!  And Mount Jackson is a town of fewer than 1,000 people!  I’m sure there are thousands of stores all over America like the one in Mount Jackson, all jammed with unwanted clothes!

      Of course, attempting to recycle our unwanted clothing is good to do.  But it seems to me that it’s more important to reduce the demand for new clothing.  And I can think of two ways that we, as individuals, can send a message to clothing makers to produce less stuff.

     First, buy used.  Rather than shop at the Gap and other retail clothing stores, we can instead patronize second-hand stores like Goodwill.  Some of these stores are poorly organized, but a little patience can result in some great finds.

     For example,  I recently found a suit at Goodwill for less than $7!  The new-looking pin-striped jacket and skirt fit perfectly and filled a niche in my wardrobe.  And my son, whenever he comes home from college, makes a stop at Goodwill.  He always goes back to college with an expanded wardrobe of good-looking clothes that cost only a pittance.

     Second, buy less.  Does owning more clothes improve the quality of our lives?  Maybe a reassessment of just how many pairs of shoes or sweaters, etc., it takes to have ‘enough’ clothes would be a good idea. I find that life is a little bit easier when I have fewer clothes to ‘manage’–to find space for or even to remember that I own.–April Moore 

     We are experiencing a respite from the cold.  On these warmer days, the land and air seem to breathe with more life.  Or is it that on such days, we humans feel more comfortable outside, and so are more likely to spend some lazy time outside watching and listening?  

     In any event, yesterday afternoon was almost balmy, compared to the very cold days we’d had for awhile.  My husband and I stood on the deck, leaning over the railing, savoring the warmer air, the sun on the needles of the white pines, and the soft green of the tree-covered mountains to the west. 

     As we drank in the comfortable pleasure of our surroundings, we began to notice a dozen or so juncoes below us.  Some were softly crunching the dried leaves, as they jumped here and there searching for food.  Others were perched in the trees. 

     As we watched, we became aware of a surprising amount of movement.  After a few moments in the leaves, a bird might dart upward to perch on a tree branch.  A bird that had been perching in a tree for a few seconds might flit down to the ground.  Back and forth.  A few moments on the ground and then a few moments in a tree.  Repeat.  Wasn’t this a rather inefficient way to feed–investing so much time and energy in changing locations?  Once a couple of birds, in their location swapping move, looked as if they might collide.

     It’s not easy for me to describe the deep pleasure I feel in watching and listening to juncoes.  There seems to be such a softness about them.  The sounds they make–hopping about in the dry leaves, fluttering from tree to ground and back–are light and pleasing. 

     And juncoes are also soft-spoken.  Now one, now another would make soft chipping chirps.  Their voices blended sweetly with the light sounds of their movements. 

     Whenever I linger and listen to the sounds the juncoes are making, I feel a deep satisfaction and happiness. 

    As Andy and I continued our leisurely observation, we realized it had become quiet.  The birds were gone!  Then I thought I noticed a few juncoes farther down the hill, darting about in the brush.  Maybe these were the same birds we had been watching. 

     How had we not noticed their departure?–April Moore

          

     I am enthralled with trees.  I find them amazing, magical, wondrous beings.  Here are 10 interesting tree facts from the book THE TREE by Colin Tudge.–April Moore

1. Many large trees are host to so many other creatures that each is a city:  as cosmopolitan as Delhi or New York and far more populous than either.
2. In the 1970s, in the crown of one fairly modest tree in Panama a scientist from the Smithsonian Institution counted 1,100 different species of beetle–yet he didn’t bother with the weevils, although they are beetles too, or look closely at the host of creatures that are not beetles, or those that were living in the roots.
3. A mature oak or beech may produce many millions of seeds in a good year (good seed years are known as “mast” years), and although they won’t do this every year, they may well have scores or even hundreds of prolific years in the course of their lives.
4. If we could take a time-lapse view of all the world this past few million or tens of millions of years, as cold has followed warm has followed cold, we would see vast and apparently immovable forests flitting over the surface of the globe like the shadows of clouds.
5. Big plants [trees] can metabolize more effectively because they command so much earth and sky;  and they can produce literally tons of seeds, to be scattered far and wide.  Small wonder that a third of all land is covered in forest.
6. The species of trees are outnumbered by nontree plants by about five to one.  The nontrees live in places where trees cannot–and in the niches created by trees.
7. Most tree species live in the tropics.
8. It is impossible to count all the different species of trees–or to be sure that they have all been counted.  But biologists can at least guess.  Extrapolating from what is known, they estimate that there are around 350,000 species of land plants in general.  At least 300,000 of them are flowering plants.  Around one-fifth of these are trees.
9. Britan may seem to have hundreds of different species of trees, but most of them have been imported by human beings.  Only 39 are believed to be true natives (and one of them, the common juniper, may in fact have been brought in by ancient people).
10. The vast boreal forests of northern Canada are dominated by only nine tree species–the quaking aspen and a handful of conifers.