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32 years separate this before and after of a beautiful Washington forest. Take a look.

Our relationship with our planet can be mutually beneficial if we commit ourselves to sustainability.

A return to green over decades.


Douglas Scott grew up on Washington's Olympic Peninsula in the dying shadow of the timber industry that had supported the region for decades.

"Nearly every home had a bright orange or yellow sign reading 'This home supported by timber dollars,'" Scott wrote on Outdoor Society.

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Science communicator Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Science educator, astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson has an incredible talent for taking complex ideas about the cosmos and making them more accessible for the average person to understand.

In a clip from a conversation with Steve Berlett on the “Diary of a CEO Podcast,” Tyson flips the script and uses the cosmos to help us better understand ourselves. But there’s one big problem getting in the way of coming to this universal understanding: our egos.

“Your ego is incompatible with the cosmic perspective,” Tyson says in the clip. “The cosmic perspective shows you how small we are, in size, in time, in space, and if you go in with a high ego, you might resist that. You might say, ‘No, I'm important.’ But I think of it differently.”

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Crater Lake, the redwoods and Na Pali coast.

The one thing that all Americans and folks worldwide can agree on is that the United States is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. When tourists trek across the states, they are always blown away by how vast the country is and the number of different climates and bioregions encompassing all 50 states.

There are the deserts of the southwest, the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii, the tundra of Alaska and the grasslands of the midwest. Not to mention the beautiful coasts of California and the picturesque bays of New England.

America has many wonders, but which place is the most beautiful? A Redditor named DriedKitten posed the question to the AskReddit subforum and received over 1,100 replies.

To rank the responses on the Reddit post, we looked at the number of upvotes each suggestion received and then ranked them. It’s not the most scientific way of doing things, but it gives us a pretty good idea about the places in America that people think are most beautiful.

Here are the top 15 most beautiful places in America ranked.

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A young woman drinking bottled water outdoors before exercising.



The Story of Bottled Waterwww.youtube.com

Here are six facts from the video above by The Story of Stuff Project that I'll definitely remember next time I'm tempted to buy bottled water.

1. Bottled water is more expensive than tap water (and not just a little).

via The Story of Stuff Project/YouTube


A Business Insider column noted that two-thirds of the bottled water sold in the United States is in individual 16.9-ounce bottles, which comes out to roughly $7.50 per gallon. That's about 2,000 times higher than the cost of a gallon of tap water.

And in an article in 20 Something Finance, G.E. Miller investigated the cost of bottled versus tap water for himself. He found that he could fill 4,787 20-ounce bottles with tap water for only $2.10! So if he paid $1 for a bottled water, he'd be paying 2,279 times the cost of tap.

2. Bottled water could potentially be of lower quality than tap water.

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