The face of America is changing — is the environmental movement ready to face change too?
“Kyra, do you know this is yours?” I ask, looking down at the skinny little girl with big, curly, dark brown locks. Her hair to body proportion resembles Thing One and Thing Two from Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat.
“What do you mean?” A furrowed face of mostly cheek and big brown eyes replies.
My four-year-old daughter and I have just spent an early summer morning exploring the Leif Erikson Trail in Forest Park. It’s 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky — a perfect day in Portland, Ore. Wide-eyed and humming her favorite Sunday school tunes, Kyra had picked and smelled flowers of an array of colors, listened to bird songs and leaves rustling in the gentle wind, identified maidenhair ferns and banana slugs, found a red-backed salamander under the bark of a fallen log, come eye-to-eye with “the biggest snail in the whole wide world,” and discovered that a small side trail sometimes leads to something bigger and better. So far, it’s been a magical day.
Kyra could stand there indefinitely wa... Read more
