Time in nature is said to be good for your mental and physical well-being. While I generally accepted that notion, I have never quite experienced it as viscerally as I did last week. Off for the week with many visitors, I was excited to see I could not shut down the repeating doom loop running in my head. Work pressures, life pressures, deep distress about the politics of the day and a whole host of other things both big and small rented serious space in my head and I could not turn it all off.
A day on the Brewster flats broke the spell. The deep blue skies, the clear water, the clean sand bottom, the birds, striped bass and kids running carefree across the flats reset my mind. There truly is a healing power to nature and we would all benefit from being outside more. Perhaps many of you, most I hope, are reading this with a sense of, “yeah, no kidding, we knew that already.” For the rest of you, get outside!
Now setting all of this above aside for a minute, my next thought upon returning to the fray on Monday was that nothing good happens by accident, especially in the world of environmental protection.
Preservation of resources requires constant vigilance and work. Land originally protected for natural resource preservation is being hungrily eyed by opportunistic housing developers as the next best source of land for more housing. Land set aside for water supply protection seems to some the ideal place to site a multipurpose machine gun range. What you or I see as a place of boundless natural beauty and habitat in Cape Cod Bay appears to Holtec as an ideal dumping ground for radioactive waste. The list goes on and on, but the point is that not only is the protection of these natural places up to us, our own well-being relies on it.
The threats to our natural world are unending and we need to answer the challenge. Your support has empowered APCC to obtain the firepower to take on the big and important fights of the day. The job never ends, however, and we need your help during this summer fundraising season to remain the backstop the Cape’s environment needs. Please give what you can and then go outside and feel good about what you just did.
