Bloggers for Positive Global Change Award!

Thanks very much to Wild Flora for tagging Pines Above Snow with a Bloggers for Positive Global Change Award. Flora won the award for her inspiring and lovely blog that uses wildlife-friendly gardening as an instrument for enhancing the beauty and sustainability of our daily lives. Congratulations to Flora for her good work.

The award was created over at Climate of Our Future, a blog with the humble mission of “changing the world we live in for the better.” While their writing focuses primarily on global climate change and myriad methods of reducing carbon emissions, their goal for the award is to recognize bloggers—regardless of focus, ideology, religion, or moral philosophy—who blog with the purpose of inspiring, catalyzing, or otherwise nudging the world toward a more sustainable, humane, enlightened future. Thanks, COF, for your worthy efforts and for a new meme that spreads your idealism, I hope, far and wide.

Now it’s my turn to pass the golden torch along to others. I’m nominating three blogs that I reply upon for information and inspiration, starting with the site of my blogging mentor, Nathan, of Talk-Lab. I love Nathan’s creative mind, which allows him to pursue his aims of creating an online lab for serious discussions of politics, philosophy, urban design, and paths toward a more civil society while having lots of fun along the way. In his blog carnival, the Carnival of Conflict, Nathan welcomes contributions seeking fresh approaches to micro and macro clashes, resulting in posts that explore everything from global justice to personal choices such as homeschooling to revive civility around the home fires.

Another of my favorite reads is Alone on a Limb. Thanks to Terrell, you can start your week with a poem, a ritual he’s used to bring positive change to elementary classrooms for 27 years and is now sharing with web readers. AOL also sponsors a wide ranging environmental education carnival each month, Learning in the Great Outdoors, featuring lively and essential information for anyone trying to reach minds, young or old, about environmental topics, local or global. I often turn to it to learn more about new children’s book titles or how to use them with students, but there’s always a diversity of topics reflecting the many, many ways dedicated educators are improving our world.

Last but not least, I’m tagging a blog that I recently discovered, Natural Patriot. Author Emmett Duffy is a professor at Virginia Institute of Marine Science and an expert in marine biodiversity yet takes the time to blog with the purpose of expanding our definition of patriotism to include stewardship of natural communities. One tactic is his spotlighting of exceptional thinkers and activists such as Richard Louv, Aldo Leopold, and Lady Bird Johnson as role model “natural patriots.” It’s no wonder that Professor Duffy was awarded an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship in 2006.

Congratulations to all of you for your important efforts. I’m looking forward to seeing what blogs you find inspiring and energizing in our shared goal of creating a better future.