Happy Friday {{first name | my friend}},

ECL TRIVIA: What is the term for pine cones that stay sealed until heat from a fire triggers them to open and release seeds? (Answer below)

Your VIP membership has a new home, and it's a big step up from where it's been living.

*** YOU MUST TAKE ACTION TO KEEP THE VIP MEMBERSHIP YOU ALREADY PAY FOR ***

Inside the new Earth Conscious Life community you can get questions answered directly, join live calls and Q&As, and ongoing included access to brand new courses and guides as they are added (for no added costs).

The first one covers detoxifying your home and using the science of nature to support your family's health. Recipe videos, meditations, and home guides all sit in one library now instead of scattered across old emails.

If I could move your account over myself, I'd have done it days ago. The platform won't let me, so it needs about a minute from you: hit the Join button, enter your name and email, confirm it, then choose monthly or annual.

Once you're in, I'm refunding and prorating whatever's left on your old VIP membership.

I've pushed the founding price back a few days because I don't want a single VIP to miss it during the move. Watch the short video here where I walk through the new community, then come get your seat.

Robin Greenfield's Foraging School (co-created by yours truly) is taking off. In the community feed (no cost), people from all walks of life are posting photos of what they're finding in their own neighborhoods, from all over the world. 🌿

Joining takes under a minute and costs nothing to be in the community itself. Once you're in, I highly encourage you to open the Classroom tab where you'll find the full course sitting at $97 (just for early founding members) instead of its regular $247.

That's 60+ video lessons across six modules: foundations, wild greens, herbs and teas, wild fruits, and roots and nuts. More than 40 wild edibles, taught one plant at a time. My team and I shot all of it out in the field, the same crew behind The Need To GROW and Farmacy of Light, so you're looking at the plants in the wild… instead of a slideshow.

Robin's about two months from finishing a full year eating 100% foraged food and medicine, so there is really no teacher on Earth like him, when it comes to this topic.

And every single enrollment funds Robin’s nonprofit to plant millions of fruit trees.

The price of the course starts climbing next week, so grab the course this week while it's still at founding pricing. Come meet the other foragers here.

🦬 HOME AFTER 200 YEARS: A herd of American bison gets released onto a 120k-acre preserve in Sonora in the next few weeks, the first to graze that stretch of the borderlands in roughly two centuries. They do the restoration work themselves, dropping seeds from their dung and hair and grazing patchy enough to open up nesting ground for birds and small mammals. Peter Winsor, who's leading the project, says the plan is that "bison will roam here and do whatever they want to do."

🌲 ASK YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT TREES: Only 1 in 5 Americans has ever had a doctor suggest they spend time outside, and nearly half get under two hours of nature a week. But 83% said they'd go outdoors more if a provider actually told them to. Ten minutes a day is enough to "reset our attention, improve our mood and even affect our immune functioning," says Texas A&M public health professor Jay Maddock.

🧠 YOUR GUT'S CHAT: For the first time, researchers scanned living human brains and matched the chemistry inside them to the bacteria in people's guts. Across 61 young women, certain microbial pathways tracked with GABA and glutamate, the brake and the accelerator of the nervous system, and the same pathways lined up with anxiety, low mood, and sleep quality. The Surrey team is careful to call this a link rather than a cause, but until now it had only been shown in mice.

What is the term for pine cones that stay sealed until heat from a fire triggers them to open and release seeds?

Answer: Serotiny. It is a survival strategy that helps certain forests regenerate after fire resets the landscape.

To a healing future,

— Rob