Many strive for personal wellness–exercise, nutrition, meditation, sleep–but it’s not easy out there, even if you read all the ingredients of your food boxes. Agricultural practices deplete soil and crops aren’t as nutrient-rich as they were even fifty years ago. In California alone, there are almost a million people without access to safe drinking water. Pollution has become a worldwide problem—people check apps for both daily air quality and the weather. When we become ill due to the toxic realities and lack of nutritional options, doctors are often only equipped to treat the symptom, but not the lifestyle that landed us there.
But healing is a macro-cosmic issue as well as a personal one. Societal healing starts with the band aid of policy. Aggressive action needs to target the disease of climate change, not merely legislation and action to lower the carbon output, but reverse it. We’ve all seen the fires, hurricanes, and floods that signal the escalation of extreme weather events. And most people understand the practices that make it seem as though man is the virus infecting the host. The earth will survive, life will return. Is it up to the 1% to decide if homo sapiens will be here when that happens?
For this issue, we sought poetry, stories, and essays that highlight healing–personal, societal, environmental, global. We sought writing that crosses cultural boundaries to raise universal awareness. As Canary poetry editor Gail Entrekin shared so eloquently in a recent article about the impact of art: “I believe that there are other occasional readers who are just now receiving this news in a visceral way that argument and scientific information have not been able to impart.”
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