Few family decisions carry as much weight as choosing an assisted living community. A good match protects independence, preserves dignity, and makes each day feel manageable. A poor one drains energy from everyone involved. Asking the right questions up front cuts through glossy brochures and polished tours. These eight questions help families judge what actually matters once a loved one moves in.

1. What Level of Personal Care Does the Community Provide?

Senior needs vary, so families must confirm exactly which services are built into daily operations. Those researching assisted living in Bullhead City often start by comparing how different communities approach daily care support. Certain communities focus on medication reminders and light help around the apartment. Others handle bathing, dressing, transfers, mobility support, and incontinence care with trained aides.

Request a written scope of services, including all pricing tiers. Clarify how often health assessments occur and whether care plans get updated as physical or cognitive conditions shift.

2. How Are Staff Trained, and What Is the Resident-to-Caregiver Ratio?

Caregiver quality influences daily life more than any amenity on the tour. Families weighing assisted living in Bullhead City should ask about caregiver certifications, dementia-specific training, and continuing education requirements for every team member. Smaller resident-to-staff ratios usually translate into quicker response times and more attentive care. Request the exact numbers for the morning, evening, and overnight shifts, as staffing often drops after dinner.

3. What Does the Monthly Cost Actually Include?

Fee structures rarely align neatly across communities. A base rate may bundle rent, meals, and housekeeping, while personal care is billed as a separate add-on. Families should request a full fee schedule covering:

• Community fees or entrance deposits
• Care level surcharges
• Medication management charges
• Guest meal or transportation fees

Transparent paperwork prevents billing surprises once a parent is settled in.

4. How Does the Community Handle Changing Health Needs?

A parent’s needs rarely stay static for long. Families should learn whether the community supports higher acuity care, memory decline, or recovery after a hospital stay. Ask whether residents can age in place or must relocate as care needs grow. Written policies matter here because verbal promises sometimes shift after leadership turnover.

5. What Do Meals, Activities, and Daily Life Look Like?

Quality of life grows out of small daily routines. Shared meals, outings, and hobbies keep residents engaged, social, and mentally active. Ask for a current menu, a weekly activity calendar, and permission to join a meal during your visit. Watch whether residents appear relaxed, welcomed, and genuinely enjoying themselves around the dining room.

5.1 Signs of a Vibrant Community

A healthy community offers varied programming, outdoor spaces, fitness classes, and resident-led clubs. Calendars stuffed with repeat bingo sessions often signal limited engagement.

6. How Are Medical Needs and Emergencies Managed?

Medical readiness can save a resident’s life during a critical moment. Ask how medications get stored, administered, and documented across every shift. Confirm whether a licensed nurse stays on site full time, visits weekly, or is simply on call. Families should also ask about hospital partnerships, emergency protocols, and how staff alert relatives when something happens overnight.

7. What Do Current Residents and Families Say?

Marketing materials present the most flattering version of any community. Honest feedback comes from people already inside the experience. Request contact information for current families willing to share candid perspectives. Online reviews add helpful context, though patterns across multiple platforms reveal far more than any single comment. Ask directly about responsiveness, cleanliness, dining quality, and how concerns get handled.

7.1 Questions Worth Asking Other Families

How fast did caregivers respond during a health scare? Did monthly billing stay predictable? Were tour-day promises actually kept after moving day arrived?

8. What Are the Move-In, Move-Out, and Refund Policies?

Every contract deserves careful review before pens touch paper. Families should understand required notice periods, refund rules for unused fees, and any conditions that could trigger a discharge. Ask whether deposits are refundable and how annual rate increases get communicated. A trustworthy community welcomes these questions and puts answers in writing without pushback.

Conclusion

Choosing an assisted living community gets easier once families trade assumptions for direct, pointed questions. Care scope, staffing, pricing, medical readiness, and resident experience all shape long-term satisfaction. Families who tour several properties, talk with current residents, and review contracts line by line usually feel settled about their final choice. A little extra preparation now creates a safer, warmer, and more rewarding chapter for an aging loved one.

The post 8 Questions Families Should Ask Before Choosing Assisted Living appeared first on Green Prophet.

The fuel pumps don’t lie. When oil prices spike, everyone pays, and lately, we have all been feeling the pain.

But the effects of this energy shock may be felt in places you might not expect: in the price of the clothes we wear.

Oil is not just what powers the ships that carry our clothes around the world. It is what most of our clothes are made of, appearing in materials such as polyester, nylon and acrylic, all derived from petrochemicals. And that is how the disruption of oil markets is driving the cost of textile production. Industry experts are already predicting a 20-25% jump in the prices of polyester, and it is only a matter of time before it reaches Irish shops.

So, what should you keep in mind when shopping for your next outfit?

It starts with the fabric

Most clothes are not designed with their end of life in mind. When a garment ends up in a landfill, everything that went into it – the water, the energy, the oil – loses value, and turns into waste that releases microplastics and other harmful chemicals into our water, land and air. Fast fashion giants, like Shein and Temu, have been identified as the biggest polluters in the industry, and France has even introduced a tax targeting their low price points.

Natural fibres, like hemp, wool and cotton, along with newer materials like lyocell, need to move back into focus, both because they are less tied to oil and better for our health. In fact, emerging research suggests that prolonged exposure to synthetic fibres may harm reproductive health, as featured in the Plastic Detox documentary.

Follow the thread

Much of fashion’s environmental impact and cost risk sits far from what we see on the shop shelves. Up to 96% of emissions happen at the start of the supply chain, in the mills and dyehouses, where raw materials become fabrics. That is where the oil shock hits first.

Brands can get ahead of this by investing in renewable energy for their factories, shortening supply chains and experimenting with less resource-intensive processes.

Using impact measurement tools, like Green Story, companies can identify where their emission hotspots are. Puma, for example, introduced a climate transition plan, requiring suppliers to cut emissions. Smaller labels, like Ireland’s Eye, are building their identity around lower-impact production. Industry-wide initiatives, like the Climate Pledge, are bringing companies together to drive joint action.

Dyeing fabric is one of fashion’s most polluting processes, highly intensive in water, chemicals and energy. Waterless dyeing solutions and undyed fabric approaches can reduce environmental impact and improve cost efficiencies.

Asking brands where and how their clothes are made is the most useful question a consumer can ask if you want to make more sustainable choices.

Natural wool and cotton

There is another structural issue in fashion that rarely makes it into the conversation. The twice-yearly wardrobe reset was invented by the fashion industry to sell more clothes. In order to keep up with this, fashion’s production calendar is an 18- to 20-month cycle from design to shop floor. It means that brands are currently finalising collections for spring 2028, committing to volume and materials for garments whose demand they can only guess at. The inevitable result is systemic overproduction, with 40% of garments never sold.

The markdown cycle that follows devalues the brand, trains customers to wait for discounts, and compresses the margins that might otherwise fund the transition to better materials and methods.

Technology is beginning to address this. AI-driven demand forecasting and machine learning models can draw on historical sales, social media signals, weather patterns and macroeconomic indicators, aligning production far more closely with actual demand.

Related: Hemp textiles pave the way for a regenerative

At the same time, 3D digital sampling can remove weeks of spinning, programming, weaving, cutting, sewing and shipping physical samples back and forth before production can begin. Adidas has already deployed it for its Futurecraft 4D footwear. These innovations can make production processes more efficient, shortening supply chains and increasing their resilience in the face of geopolitical disruptions.

Then there are the lower-tech shifts: make fewer things, make them better, and make them last. Some luxury brands like Gucci and Prada have already abandoned the seasonal calendar. This way, brands are not racing to clear last season’s stock; they can charge full price for longer. Consumer behaviour is moving in the same direction, with younger shoppers gravitating toward clothes worth keeping, repairing and reselling.

Small acts, compounding effects

While the transformation we need cannot happen without consistent climate action from governments and industry, individual choices play a role in how markets shift. Demand shapes supply. And with a sundress season approaching, it’s a great moment to reflect on how to choose what to wear, integrating sustainability into your style.

That does not mean transforming your wardrobe overnight, but we can look at buying clothes made of natural fibres as an investment in renewables.

A comment on social media, an email to a brand asking what to do with a product when you are done with it. These small acts add up. And at the end of the day, clothes that make you happy every time you put them on are rarely the ones you bought on an impulse on sale. They are the ones made with care and designed to last, better for your wallet and for the planet.

Brianna Kilcullen, CEO of Anact

Brianna Kilcullen is the founder and CEO of Anact, a producer of sustainable towels made from hemp and organic cotton. Brianna is a symbol of how small choices can spark systemic change, and is a leading voice advocating for regenerative, localized manufacturing and the opportunity of hemp to revolutionize the textile supply chain.

Her mission is to challenge the outdated systems of the industry and inspire others to act by creating products, policies, and partnerships that prioritize people and the planet. Prior to starting Anact, Brianna worked in the apparel industry for prAna, a subsidiary of Columbia Sportswear and Under Armour. She is a proud citizen in the US and Ireland, and has traveled to more than 40 countries, working in factories on almost every continent. Brianna has appeared on numerous podcasts and in online publications like Politico. Brianna has authored opinion pieces and writes her own blog.

The post The fossil fuel problem hiding in your wardrobe appeared first on Green Prophet.

Microsoft’s record investment in Australia will build data centres. What must be built with the same rigour and commitment, says transformation executive Athalie Williams, is the human capability that will determine whether the country captures the value or simply hosts it.

When Microsoft announced a A$25 billion commitment to Australia’s AI infrastructure, nine new data centres, three million people trained in AI skills by 2028, the headlines landed, predictably, on the capital figure. It is Microsoft’s largest single-country investment anywhere in the world, and the scale is striking.

But Athalie Williams thinks the more consequential number is the other one.

“The skills commitment deserves more scrutiny than the capex,” she says. “Three million people is not a training programme. It’s an attempt to rewire how an economy thinks about work.”

Williams, who served as Chief People Officer at BHP and most recently as Chief HR Officer at BT Group (British Telecommunications) before moving into a portfolio career, has spent her career at the intersection of large-scale transformation and human capability. Her view of the Microsoft announcement is shaped by that experience, and it is not entirely comfortable.

Tenants in Someone Else’s Ecosystem

Australia has a reasonable record of building physical infrastructure and a more mixed one of translating it into lasting economic advantage. She sees that tension clearly in the AI context.

“Countries that build the physical architecture of AI but fail to develop the workforce to use it will end up as tenants in someone else’s ecosystem,” she says. “Consuming AI rather than shaping it.”

The distinction matters. Data centres generate construction jobs and ongoing operational roles, and they anchor hyperscaler presence in a region. But the economic multiplier, the value that compounds over time, flows to the organisations and economies that can use the technology to create new products, services, and competitive advantages. That requires something data centres cannot provide: a workforce that is AI-capable, not merely AI-adjacent.

She draws on her experience leading a multi-year effort to build digital fluency across a global workforce of more than 80,000 people, many of them in operational roles that had historically required little digital capability. “We identified a widening gap between current skills and what we’d need to operate effectively in the future,” she recalls. “We had to assess the baseline, build a complete digital learning curriculum, and shift our people’s capabilities at scale. It wasn’t a programme. It was a sustained transformation of how the organisation thought about capability.”

The comparison with a national AI skills initiative is instructive. Three million Australians trained by 2028 sounds ambitious. Her experience suggests it is the beginning of a question, not an answer to one.

What Boards and Executives Haven’t Confronted

For her, the Microsoft announcement surfaces a challenge that extends well beyond government policy. It points directly at boards and executive teams across every sector of the Australian economy.

“If a hyperscaler is investing at this scale in your workforce’s AI readiness, what is your own organisation’s plan?” she asks. “Waiting for Microsoft or government to close your capability gap is not a strategy.”

It is a pointed question, and one that she argues too few executive teams are genuinely confronting. In her recent writing on AI and human performance, she has described what she calls the “productivity paradox” of AI adoption: organisations invest heavily in technology, throughput rises, but resilience, judgement, and trust, the capabilities that underpin long-term performance, can fall behind if leadership does not design for them deliberately.

“Faster isn’t always wiser,” she notes. “AI delivers speed and scale. But faster processes and smarter models don’t automatically make wiser organisations. The gap is in the human architecture around the technology.”

In one of the most significant workforce transitions she has navigated, she helped reshape a major organisation through a plan to reduce headcount by tens of thousands of roles by 2030, while simultaneously building the digital capabilities needed for a technology-led future. The challenge was not primarily technical. It was human.

“Organisations hire really smart people who care deeply about the customer and come to work every day wanting to do a good job,” she says. “The question is whether you give them the tools, the clarity, and the capability to contribute to where the organisation is heading. If you don’t, the technology investment stalls.”

A Climate Reckoning in the Wings

She is careful not to frame the Microsoft announcement as straightforwardly positive. There is a harder conversation embedded in it that she believes many organisations are yet to fully face.

Australia’s data centre boom is on a direct collision course with its climate commitments. Large-scale AI infrastructure consumes significant quantities of energy and water. Environmental advocates who have pushed back on accelerated approvals for new facilities are not simply being obstructionist; they are raising a trade-off that the business community has been slow to fully engage with.

“I’ve sat around executive tables where AI investment proposals were tabled without a clear view of their carbon implications,” she says. “Boards are approving capability they haven’t fully costed environmentally. The tension between digital ambition and net zero will only sharpen from here.”

It is the kind of observation that reflects her broader approach to transformation: the imperative to hold multiple threads simultaneously rather than treating complex change as a series of separate problems to be solved in sequence.

Three Stories Running at Once

Her framing of the Microsoft investment is ultimately a challenge to the dominant narrative around it. The story being told is a technology story, infrastructure, compute, capacity. She sees at least three running in parallel, and argues that separating them is precisely how value gets lost.

“It’s a human capital story, a climate governance story, and a sovereignty story, all at once,” she says. “The organisations and policymakers who hold those threads together will be the ones who capture the value. The ones who pull them apart and deal with each in isolation may wonder, in five years, where the advantage went.”

That framing, integrated, enterprise-wide, grounded in human performance, is characteristic of how she approaches transformation. She has consistently argued, across industries and contexts, that change efforts fail not because of flawed strategy or insufficient technology, but because leaders treat complex, interconnected challenges as though they can be untangled and resolved one strand at a time.

For Australia, the question is whether the arrival of A$25 billion in AI infrastructure prompts that kind of thinking at the national level, or whether the headline figure becomes the story, and the harder work gets quietly deferred.

She is, characteristically, optimistic but unsentimental. “The opportunity is real,” she says. “But it won’t be captured by treating this solely as a technology story.”

The post Australia’s $25 Billion AI Moment: Infrastructure Is the Easy Part appeared first on Green Prophet.

Stella McCartney is back at H&M, and the fashion world is swooning again. But behind the tailored jackets, cherry prints and recycled glass beads is a harder question: should we still trust wool when it comes wrapped in ethical language?

The new Stella McCartney x H&M collection is being sold as a sustainability story. Organic cotton, recycled metals, plant-based coatings and certified materials all appear in the marketing. It is thoughtful by fast-fashion standards. But then there is the wool.

According to data from tutoring marketplace Wiingy, while entire categories of white-collar work — from copywriting to entry-level software development — have shown sustained four-year declines in learner demand, craft-based industries like wool and fiber arts have remained largely insulated from the same pressure. The full list of skills most at risk of AI automation tells a striking story about which kinds of work are surviving the shift.

So who is going to be the next sheep farming and shearer? Who will rise up to be the next Stella McCartney.

That makes wool fascinating right now. It is ancient, tactile and stubbornly physical. AI can write ad copy and generate fashion campaigns in seconds, but it cannot shear a sheep gently, sort fleece by touch, or spin fiber into yarn. Wool remains tied to animals, land and human hands.

But this is also where the romance gets complicated.

Several key pieces in the Stella McCartney x H&M collection — including the double-breasted blazer, matching trousers and wool car coat, are made with wool certified to the Responsible Wool Standard, or RWS. The standard is administered by Textile Exchange and is designed to verify animal welfare, land management and social responsibility.

On the surface, that sounds reassuring. Consumers see the certification and imagine sheep grazing peacefully under blue skies. But investigations suggest the reality can be much more troubling.

In reporting by Green Prophet, The New Zealand Merino Company, now known as Zentera, quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website after an undercover investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into farms within its certified supply chain. Zentera now describes its wool more cautiously as being “grown with care.”

PETA investigators say they documented shearers kicking, beating and roughly handling sheep on farms producing certified wool. Some animals were reportedly left with wounds stitched without pain relief. The findings have prompted renewed scrutiny of the wool industry’s ethical claims.

The problem is not limited to one company. Critics argue that many certification programs rely on announced audits, giving farms advance notice before inspectors arrive. Procedures such as tail docking and castration may still be allowed, and enforcement standards vary.

Even when certification improves conditions, it does not guarantee a cruelty-free product. Nor does it answer the broader environmental questions surrounding wool production, including methane emissions, land use and water consumption.

That does not mean every wool garment is unethical. Some farms undoubtedly treat animals better and manage land more responsibly than others. Certifications can help move the industry in the right direction. But they should not be treated as a final verdict.

Wool may be one of the rare industries that survives the AI age because it belongs to the body before it belongs to the market. It is touch, weather, grass, lanolin, sweat and skill. It carries the memory of shepherding and textile traditions thousands of years old.

Yet wool is also a business, and businesses are skilled at storytelling.

The Stella McCartney x H&M collaboration is more than a fashion event. It is a test of whether sustainability labels still mean something in an era when consumers are increasingly skeptical and artificial intelligence is stripping value from so much knowledge work.

The post Stella McCartney Returns to H&M — But Should We Trust the Wool? appeared first on Green Prophet.

I did not go looking for Oskar Schindler. But he found me. One day, while wandering through an old cemetery near Zion Gate in Jerusalem with my mother—who had come to the Holy Land to feel the Bible—I came across his grave.

The cemetery sits just outside the Old City walls. It is simple and unadorned. Before me lay a modest grave slab covered with piles of stones, as Jewish people do when they visit a loved one. This grave had more stones than any other. The name belonged to a man who was not Jewish, yet chose the Jews when it mattered most.

Before his death in 1974, Schindler asked to be buried in Jerusalem. He rests there because he risked everything to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. For his moral courage, he is remembered as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. The Talmud, compiled roughly 1,800 years ago, teaches that righteous people from any nation or faith are granted a share in the World to Come. In Judaism, the olam ha-ba is not simply heaven. It is the world you help create through your actions.

Schindler chose to build his place in that world. Standing by his grave, I hoped that some of his righteousness might rub off on me. I feel the same way when I think about those who stand with Jews today, even when doing so brings isolation, financial loss, and threats to their safety.

Douglas Murray speaks openly about rising antisemitism in the West. Luai Ahmed challenges antisemitism in the Arab world and supports Israel despite the personal cost. Goldie Ghamari, an Iranian Canadian politician, has spoken forcefully against antisemitism and has received death threats.

Then there is Paul Finlayson. “I said I stood with Israel, and I was called a criminal,” he told me. Paul is a Canadian educator whose life changed after he compared Hamas to the Nazis. He says the statement led to his dismissal from his teaching positions and devastated his career and family.

According to Paul, he went from earning $300,000 a year to $24,000. “My income has been reduced by 90%,” he said. “My family is shattered.” These are his claims. Whether one agrees with him or not, his story raises important questions about free speech, due process, and what happens to people who publicly support Israel.

I did not grow up Jewish. By the time I was eighteen, I had met only a handful of Jewish people. But over the years, getting close to Jews and to Israel changed me. My family comes from Europe, where too many people stood by while their Jewish neighbors were taken away. That history still echoes through generations. The thread runs from Oskar Schindler to the present day.

Supporting what is right requires action. Who will stand up for Paul? If not me, then who?

The post I Went Looking for Jerusalem. I Found Oskar Schindler appeared first on Green Prophet.

I am picky about bags. Not in a fashion way because I don’t care about logos. I care about whether a thing will hold up when I’m hiking a ridge in the Galilee, or sweating through a farmers market in July, or stuffing a laptop and two days of clothes into whatever fits behind the passenger seat. I care about whether the person who made it gave a damn. That’s a short list. Pilsok just made it. They turn garbage into works of art.

Pilsok is a handmade backpack and bag label out of Kyiv, Ukraine. Founded in 2007 by Dmytro Isaienko, it’s been quietly building a cult following among people who go places, and we are talking ahout real places, not Instagram approximations of places. Because I’ve been all over the world and see the angles that influencers use. That’s not real life.

If you’ve been searching for the Pilsok beetle bag or the Pilsok backpack and wondering if it’s worth it, I’ll give you a straight answer: yes. Here’s why.

What Is the Pilsok Beetle Bag, Exactly?

The name alone tells you something. Pilsok’s beetle bag — their standout shoulder bag — is cut from Cordura, a fabric that laughs at rain, mud, and the kind of abuse vanlifers inflict on their gear daily. The hardware is solid, the stitching is done by hand, in-house, in Kyiv. (Just like the guys who built Havie, also from Kiev) When you open it, you can feel that someone actually thought about how a person uses a bag, not how a bag looks on a shelf.

Every piece Pilsok makes is slightly different, because it’s made by a human being with their hands and they are using upcycled material, or deadstock like Reformation.

The Airbag Collection: Upcycling Done for Real

Here’s where it gets interesting for those of us who think about what we buy. And this is how we found them. Emirates built a line of luxury carry-ons from airplane interiors. Pilsok released a line of backpacks and bags made from decommissioned car airbags, the ones pulled from disassembled vehicles that would otherwise head to landfill. The line is called N08-AIRBAG (30L) and they sold out almost as fast as they were made.

The airbags used in the beetle backpacks were never deployed so they are perfectly perfect. It takes roughly three airbags to make one backpack. The material is a waterproof, tear-resistant nylon with polyurethane impregnation, originally engineered to deploy at 200 mph and cushion a human body. Now it carries your water bottle, Sony camera, and your journal. The problem is good luck if you can ever buy one. That’s what real craft does: it creates demand for the hands.

You can still see the folds, the seams, sometimes even the printed codes from the original airbag. Reminds me of Ilanit Nutra’s upcycled bags from car tire inner tubes. Each Pilsok bag wears its past life on its surface. I find that honest in a way that most “sustainable fashion” is not.

There’s no greenwashing here, no vague promise of a better world attached to a product that still shipped from a factory farm of cheap labor. This is a small studio in a country still at war, turning industrial salvage into something people will carry for decades.

When I write about circular design, and I’ve been writing about it since before most brands knew what the word meant (see some problems in the sustainable wool industry here), I’m looking for this: materials that carry on, objects that can be passed down, things built to outlast trends. The Pilsok airbag backpack is one of the cleaner examples I’ve encountered.

Why Millennials Who Actually Live the Life Will Get It

You know the type. They own a Patagonia jacket that’s twelve years old and they’ve re-seamed it twice. They drove their van to Baja last winter and their gear had to survive salt air, sand, and a busted zipper situation at 11 p.m. in the dark. They bike to the farmers market, they go to Burning Man and build a time machine out of upcycled fishing huts. They’re skeptical of anything that costs $400 and comes with a sustainability certificate PDF they’ve never read.

The Pilsok backpack, rolltop, Cordura, built for city streets or trail access roads, speaks directly to that person. Not because of the story marketing, but because of what happens when you actually use it. Reviewers keep using words like “slick,” “durable,” “quality.” One person on Etsy said it’s the best bag they’ve ever owned, no qualifier. Another said it holds up for hiking and still looks right in the city. That’s the duality this crowd lives every day.
And for the Venice Beach crowd, people who want to look intentional without looking like they tried, the Pilsok is that bag. It doesn’t have a brand splashed across the front. It’s the kind of thing you notice on someone and ask about quietly.

Where to Buy the Pilsok Backpack

Pilsok sells through their Etsy shop (search: Pilsok, or Pilsock) and through their Instagram, @pilsok. The airbag upcycle line has sold through Instagram in particular. Stock is limited by the nature of the materials: they can only work with what gets salvaged.
Price-wise, these aren’t fast fashion and they are also not luxury markup. Sort of like Cotopaxis bags we’ve reviewed here. We bought one 5 years ago and it’s still our favorite duffel.

If you’re looking for the Pilsok backpack price or asking where to buy a Pilsok backpack for sale, Etsy is your most reliable entry point right now. Pilsok bags show up there in rotating inventory: rolltop backpacks, messenger bags, waist packs, the beetle bag shoulder style. Sign up for their shop notifications so you catch restocks.

Is This the Sustainable Backpack You’ve Been Looking For?

Let me be direct. Most “eco” bags on the market are made from recycled plastic bottles by brands that care more about the press release than the product. Pilsok came at it the other way: they started with solid craft, with a city, with a specific material sourced from car graveyards, and they built something that works. The sustainability isn’t marketing. It’s what the bag is made of. If you want a handmade Kyiv backpack that’ll survive #vanlife, trail access, city commutes, and fifteen years of you not being gentle with your things, and you want the object to carry some meaning beyond its function — this is it.

Related circular design articles:

Upcycled aviation: Emirates turns retired aircraft into luxury bags (limited-edition “Aircrafted” collection).

Biomaterials & circular design: Stella McCartney’s compostable sneakers (BioCir® Flex); Stella McCartney chooses Balena for upcycled foamy fashion; living plastics that clean water; ten future-forward sustainable fashion companies; slow and sustainable fashion through your eyewear; and our overview of circular design in 2025.

DIY upcycling roots: turn old T-shirts into bags; fuse plastic bags into durable sheeting; and a very early look at creative reuse in recycled map “infobags”. For more, browse our sustainable fashion and circular fashion archives.

The post The Pilsok Beetle Bag is the only backpack you will need in your van – or your life appeared first on Green Prophet.

According to the National Safety Council, the year 2024 recorded 5,218 deaths involving large trucks. This figure represents a 3% decline relative to the previous year. Looking back at the statistics over the last ten years, it can be said that deaths from truck accidents have increased.

Truck accidents can result in catastrophic injuries. With the disparity of weight between a passenger car and commercial trucks, there is an obvious increase in severity when they are involved in an accident together. Smaller vehicle drivers experience collision impacts that their vehicle safety systems cannot control when two vehicles crash. In Canada, a trucker killed a team of teen hockey players, leading to catastrophic losses to an entire community. Safer trucking, greener trucking, is sustainable trucking. 

Let’s discuss the contributing factors that allow trucks to cause catastrophic injuries.

Why Truck Crashes Produce Injuries at a Different Scale

Heavy and large as they are, trucks travel at highway speeds with vastly greater energy than a car cruising at the same speed. The height differential between trucks and passenger vehicles creates its own category of extreme injuries. 

Passenger cars are designed to absorb energy at bumper height. A truck trailer bed reaches chest height or roof height for most cars, which results in the complete bypassing of protective vehicle design in particular crash situations.

Collision Types That Cause the Most Severe Injuries

Underride crashes

A rear underride occurs when a car moves underneath the truck trailer instead of hitting the front bumper. In case of a side underride, truck drivers tend to turn or change lanes, with the edge of the trailer striking the windshields or rooftops of adjacent vehicles. The results become deadly since the safety systems designed to keep passengers safe inside the vehicle stop functioning.

The three protective systems of airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones protect against bumper-height impacts. A trailer that enters at roof or windshield height compresses the occupant space directly, crushing or severing whatever is in its path. Underride crashes result in traumatic brain injuries, decapitation, partial decapitation, spinal cord injuries, and chest crush injuries.

By 1998, the federal government legislated the mandatory requirement of rear underride protection for trailers. Unfortunately, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found this requirement inadequate. The National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that side underride guards could save 89-200 lives each year, yet there are hardly any federal mandates in sight for implementing them. 

According to Gonzales catastrophic injury lawyer Andre P. Gauthier, one aspect that makes accident claims involving trucks more complex is that numerous parties could be held liable for the accident. In underride crashes, the driver, truck manufacturer, and carrier share liability when an underride guard breaks during testing or when no adequate guard exists. 

Jackknife crashes

Jackknife crashes are defined as when the driver loses control of the truck when its trailer swings outward to a 90-degree angle. This accident is normally caused by both slippery driving conditions and the driver making emergency steering attempts. The trailer sweeps across multiple lanes, and vehicles alongside or behind the truck have no way to avoid it. The sweeping mass of a trailer under high-speed conditions has the potential force to kill passengers of any vehicle it hits, as its abrupt collision can have grave results. Jackknifing typically occurs when there is poor vehicle maintenance, worn brake torque in an emergency braking situation, or a motorcycle driver making a quick lane change.

Rollover crashes

Highway trucks have a high center of gravity. As such, they are prone to rolling over when negotiating sharp turns or making an abrupt shift. 

The situation becomes worse if the truck is loaded improperly and does not observe necessary safety precautions. There is a higher chance for them to tip over on sharp turns.

A rolling truck will crush any vehicle caught beneath it. The FMCSA cargo loading standards establish dedicated securement methods that carriers and loading contractors must follow. Any breach of these regulations results in cargo shifting liability, which extends to all parties involved except the driver.

Rear-end collisions

It is usually the smaller vehicle that takes the worst beating in head-on collisions. Trucks, which are bigger and heavier than most vehicles, can cause great damage in a collision with a car.

During such an accident, the car may fail to absorb the force of the impact and then crumple. This will cause several injuries ranging from severe to life-threatening to its occupants.

The Catastrophic Injuries That Result

Traumatic brain injury

During any rapid acceleration or deceleration accident, the brain inside the cranium would be shaken violently and suffer some injuries.

The range of traumatic brain injuries from truck crashes includes concussion and severe diffuse axonal injury. The long-term effects of this condition include cognitive deficits, seizure disorders, personality and behavioral changes, loss of motor function, and, in extreme cases, a permanent inability to live independently. Life care planners who serve as expert witnesses in these cases typically estimate that their clients will require seven-figure lifetime care expenses.

Spinal cord injury

The spinal column suffers various types of injuries, which include compression, shearing, and hyperflexion, during a crash. The cord becomes damaged, which causes people to experience either partial or complete paralysis that extends from the injury site. The effects of cervical injuries extend to both arms, hands, and diaphragm function. Meanwhile, thoracic injuries lead to different levels of paralysis that start from the chest area. Spinal cord injuries need emergency treatment, which requires immediate stabilization through surgical procedures. The lifetime medical costs for a severe spinal cord injury routinely exceed several million dollars.

Internal organ damage and internal bleeding

A truck crash transfers forces that can cause spleen ruptures, liver lacerations, bowel punctures, and vascular structure tears. Drivers who experience internal injuries during a crash will not show any visible signs until actual body harm occurs. A person who walked away from a scene may be bleeding internally without experiencing decisive symptoms for hours. Any person who survived a major truck crash must undergo an urgent emergency examination. People who experience internal injuries risk dying if doctors fail to recognize and operate on their condition.

Burn injuries

Truck fuel tanks hold much greater fuel capacity than passenger cars do. A major truck crash can rupture fuel lines and flammable or hazardous cargo to create dangerous fire conditions. Trucks carrying dangerous goods can either be a fire hazard or a toxic exposure hazard, depending on the type of cargo it carries.

How Federal Regulations Shape Truck Accident Liability

Regulatory schemes give direction to the multifaceted functions of the commercial trucking industry in the United States. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration lays down all possible rules that will control aspects of commercial vehicle operations ranging from driver qualification all the way to vehicle maintenance procedures, such as drug testing practices, cargo securement methods, electronic logging device specifications, and hours-of-service regulations. The violation of hours-of-service rules by a truck driver creates evidence of negligence, especially when the driver becomes fatigued and causes a crash. The maintenance records of a trucking company provide evidence against the carrier when they show that someone discovered a brake defect but left it unfixed. 

The company responsible for loading cargo shares liability if their cargo securement procedures failed to meet federal standards, which led to a load shift that caused a rollover accident. Electronic logging devices have become mandatory for most interstate commercial carriers since 2017 to track their drivers’ speed and braking activities. These systems also provide the driver’s GPS location and driving hours. 

Event data recorders capture the seconds immediately before a crash. The data can demonstrate if the driver exceeded speed limits, became too tired, or performed hard braking. The preservation of that data needs immediate legal action since it becomes vulnerable to overwriting and erasure within a short time frame after a crash.

Truck accident cases routinely involve multiple defendants. Each defendant maintains separate insurance coverage while facing different degrees of liability. The legal process requires complete identification of all responsible parties because this process affects the calculation of compensation, which must cover long-term costs resulting from catastrophic injuries.

The investigation requires all elements to be completed and a comprehensive investigation needs to start as soon as possible. Evidence exists that connects the carrier to the driver while showing the truck’s maintenance history and the cargo-loading operations. 

The Scale of Injury Demands a Matching Legal Response

People who sustain truck accident injuries that reach catastrophic levels require more than three months to recover. The medical treatment, rehabilitation, long-term care, and loss of earning capacity that follow a serious truck crash accumulate over years and decades. Injured individuals and their families require financial resources. The settlements or verdicts must be included in their future expenses.

Immediately after an accident, trucking companies and their insurers begin their crash investigation process. The investigation process needs to reach the same standards that exist for the defense team since the people who suffered from these crashes deserve equal protection. Carrying out investigations will safeguard evidence while establishing all accountable parties and recording their complete financial losses.

The post How Truck Accidents Cause Catastrophic Injuries appeared first on Green Prophet.

Japan is a country that builds 100-year companies; while 50 years ago Made In Japan implied an inferior mass-manufactured product, the quality of Japan today says Switzerland of the East. Tokyo might fool you: it is a city that was so far ahead in the 90s that it still looks high-tech today but most of Japan is built on traditions of hand craft and a quality of design.

While so much has changed since the Iran war started, the stark image of a package of a once very colorful snack brand now in monochrome black and white in Japan throws us back to the feeling of Victory Gardens, and World War I and II when items were rationed and old flour sacks were turned into clothing.

The move comes in response to “supply instability affecting certain raw materials amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East,” the company said in a statement. “This measure is intended to help maintain a stable supply of products.”

Calbee stresses that what’s inside the bag remains the same and they say the black-and-white change will apply to 14 products sold in Japan. The new packaging will start appearing on May 25 and won’t affect product quality.

A spokesperson from the Japanese government said it had “received no reports of immediate supply issues regarding printing ink or naphtha, and we recognize that the necessary volume for Japan as a whole is being secured.”

Naphtha is a byproduct of the petroleum industry and sometimes used in parts of the ink manufacturing process.

Beyond fuel, crude oil is the foundation for thousands of everyday products. Petrochemicals are used to make plastics, synthetic fabrics such as polyester and nylon, printer and pen inks, paints, detergents, cosmetics, medicines, tires, asphalt, fertilizers, pesticides, and many components in electronics and medical devices.

The packaging around food, the foam in mattresses and car seats, the insulation in buildings, and even items like lipstick may contain oil-derived ingredients. In practical terms, if something is made of plastic, synthetic fibers, rubber, or industrial chemicals, there is a good chance it originated from the oil and gas industry.

Did you know that chewing gum is made from plastic and releases an estimated 3000 pieces plastic particles in a 10 minute chew?

The post Japan’s packaging turns black and white from Iran oil shortage appeared first on Green Prophet.

A retired Swiss biology teacher has built one of the most unusual diving devices ever featured on Green Prophet: a sleek, fish-shaped underwater breathing system called Hydrophilis. Inspired by the hydrodynamics of marine animals and refined through dozens of test dives, the compact rebreather allows its inventor, Oliver Isler, to glide underwater with dramatically less effort than conventional scuba gear.

When Green Prophet first wrote about Hydrophilis, readers were fascinated by its futuristic form and almost mythical appearance. Some compared it to a dolphin, others to a torpedo. Later, commenters made some funny and crude jokes about the diving gear.

Since then, Isler has continued testing and refining the prototype in Swiss lakes and warm-water seas, completing 54 dives and proving that his idea is far more than a whimsical experiment.

Isler is not an engineer. Before retirement, he taught biology in a Swiss secondary school. His ambition was not to launch a company or disrupt the diving industry, but to create a device that would allow him to move through the water as effortlessly and quietly as possible. “The search for symbiosis — to blend into the marine environment — means seeking ease of movement and discretion, in order to disturb the local fauna as little as possible,” he tells Green Prophet in an exclusive interview.

To achieve this, he adopted a NACA airfoil profile, the same aerodynamic geometry used in aircraft wings and submarine bodies. The result is a streamlined shell that dramatically reduces drag.

Faster Than Conventional Scuba

Traditional scuba equipment places cylinders, hoses, and buoyancy devices across a diver’s back and sides, creating significant resistance in the water on the back side of the diver.  Hydrophilis was built different.

At age 75, using a soft monofin designed for endurance rather than speed, Isler reached 2.2 meters per second in a swimming pool. By comparison, he says that conventional scuba divers rarely exceed 0.7 meters per second even under intense effort. This reduction in drag means less energy expenditure, less noise, and a more meditative experience underwater. You can become one with the water instead of being pressured to maintain buoyancy.

How the Hydrophilis System Works

Hydrophilis is a miniature closed-circuit rebreather. Instead of releasing bubbles with every breath, the diver reuses exhaled gas after carbon dioxide is absorbed by soda lime.

The prototype Isler built includes:

A 1-liter, 300-bar cylinder
A custom 3-liter counterlung
Integrated soda lime scrubber
Modified mouthpiece
Compact helmet and fairing
Weighted belt using dense cobalt shot

Isler dives with pure oxygen to depths of 6 meters, with 90 to 100 minutes of autonomy, or with Nitrox 55 to 20 meters, where he achieves 45 to 50 minutes of dive time.

He says it’s safety through simplicity: Unlike commercial rebreathers, Hydrophilis has no redundant backup system. If anything fails, Isler removes the helmet and ascends directly to the surface while exhaling. This is the nature of the system. Using traditional systems, a diver would face nitrogen poisoning requiring a decompression chamber.

“With pure oxygen or Nitrox 55%, even from 20 meters, no decompression stop is required,” he says. The philosophy is radical miniaturization rather than electronic complexity.

Will Hydrophilis Ever Be Sold?

Probably not, he says. But would Cousteau be happy? Hell yeah!

Certification standards currently require a counterlung volume of at least 5 liters, while Hydrophilis uses only 3 liters, which Isler says is entirely sufficient. He also questions whether there is a large commercial market for a device requiring soda lime and specialized training.

“My primary goal has always been to explore this hydrodynamic concept and enjoy the experience myself, without aiming for commercialization.”

Hydrophilis is not intended to replace scuba: “I see Hydrophilis as a freediver who does not need to hold their breath,” Isler says.

That may be the best description of this extraordinary invention: a personal experiment in biomimicry, engineering, and underwater grace.

For those who dream of moving like a fish, Oliver Isler has shown that sometimes the most compelling innovations come not from corporations, but from curious individuals willing to challenge convention.

Below is our Q&A interview with Oliver Isler, in his own words:

Green Prophet: Your design seems inspired by fish, dolphins, and the natural shapes of marine animals. Was your goal to mimic nature, or was the streamlined form primarily driven by hydrodynamic engineering?

The goal was to achieve a streamlined shape with minimal drag (resistance to forward motion). While I did want to disturb marine animals as little as possible, the constraints of physics led me to adopt a NACA profile. So it was primarily a technical constraint.

Green Prophet: You are a retired biology teacher, not a professional diving engineer. How did your background in biology shape the concept of Hydrophilis?

I am not a diving engineer. Before retiring, I was a biology teacher at a secondary school. The search for symbiosis — to “blend into” the marine environment — means seeking ease of movement and discretion in order to disturb the local fauna as little as possible.

Green Prophet: Scuba diving equipment has remained largely unchanged for decades. Why do you think there has been so little innovation in underwater breathing systems?

That is a broad question! Indeed, there have been relatively few changes. That said, the basic equipment is functional, and for a standard diver who simply wants to observe the underwater world, it is sufficient. In addition, a second regulator has very often been added, which has further improved safety.

Green Prophet: What are the main performance advantages of Hydrophilis compared with traditional scuba gear?

The original idea was truly to achieve the best possible penetration through the water. Dive duration is not greater than with traditional scuba equipment, but it is very good considering the extremely compact size. Improved hydrodynamics inevitably result in a major reduction in drag, while also allowing faster movement.

I conducted a speed test in a swimming pool. At 75 years old, using a soft monofin (stiffness 3 on a scale of 8), intended more for endurance swimming than pure speed, I was able to reach 2.2 meters per second, which is not bad for my age! With traditional scuba gear, it is difficult to reach even 0.7 m/s under intense effort.

Regarding safety, the only real advantage is the reduced effort required to move forward. Otherwise, in case of a problem, the procedure is simply to return to the surface. With pure oxygen or Nitrox 55%, even from a depth of 20 meters, no decompression stop is required. Therefore, in the event of a breathing-system failure, ascent is normally straightforward.

Without going as far as meditation, the pleasure of effortless movement is obviously present on every dive.

Green Prophet: Switzerland has a history of precision engineering and unusual inventors. Do you think there is something in Swiss culture that encourages independent experimentation?

Difficult to answer. Does the serious — sometimes overly serious — and orderly Swiss mentality encourage people to break free from that psychological framework by attempting somewhat unconventional experiments? Perhaps, but that is only a hypothesis, and I am not sure it is something specifically Swiss.

Green Prophet: Some people on social media have mocked the appearance of Hydrophilis. How do you respond to criticism and jokes about your invention?

With social media, one must expect every possible reaction: supportive or mocking. Comparing my prototype to a penis is not particularly flattering. My hypothesis is that those who reacted that way did so emotionally, without even taking the time to read my article in In DEPTH. Or are they frustrated? Perhaps.

My response to that kind of reaction is this: people who never attempt anything, who have no projects or challenges in their lives, certainly avoid failure. That is true. But I do not envy them, because I find such an existence somewhat dull.

I also believe that any innovation may first be rejected before eventually being accepted.

Green Prophet: Without a traditional backup air source, how do you manage safety if the breathing system fails underwater?

As I explained earlier, safety does not depend on someone else. I trained to simulate a failure scenario. In such a case, I remove the helmet (see photos) and ascend, freediving if necessary, while exhaling slightly to avoid pulmonary overexpansion. Once at the surface, I simply swim back to the boat, for example.

A different protocol would be incompatible with miniaturization, since there is no room for a backup system.

Green Prophet: Do you see Hydrophilis as a replacement for scuba diving, or as an entirely different category of underwater experience?

I see Hydrophilis more as a different approach. Something like a freediver who does not need to hold their breath!

It will never compete with traditional scuba diving, but rather offer a different way of diving and moving through the marine environment.

Green Prophet: What was the greatest engineering challenge in building such a compact underwater breathing system?

For optimal penetration through the water, the fairing had to occupy the smallest possible volume. Miniaturization therefore became an obsession, while still respecting breathing-hose diameters and mouthpiece dimensions compatible with effortless breathing.

For example, I had to modify a mouthpiece so that it would take up the least possible space. The miniature cylinder (1 liter / 300 bar), with its optimal shape, the soda lime filter integrated into the body of the prototype, and the counterlung specially built to conform as closely as possible to the interior of the fairing were all part of this process.

The weighting system as well, using cobalt shot (18 g/cm³), is worn underneath the freediving suit.

Green Prophet: Could Hydrophilis ever become a commercial product?

I honestly have no idea.

The major issue with certification is that the required counterlung volume is at least 5 liters. Mine is about 3 liters, which is entirely sufficient. So it would first require convincing certification experts to change their mindset so that such a design could be recognized. Not simple.

Then there is the question of whether there would even be a market for Hydrophilis. That is uncertain as well, because the use of soda lime means it will never become a true mass-market product.

Personally, my primary goal has always been to explore this hydrodynamic concept and enjoy the experience myself, without aiming for commercialization.

Could it inspire similar projects in the future? Time will tell.

The post Hydrophilis rebreather, an interview with Oliver Isler appeared first on Green Prophet.

Can Zara speak with their recently departed mother through fungal networks?

In April my mom passed away and I attended her funeral as a relative outsider in her life. Seeking some distance from her friends, I borrowed the Israeli custom of wearing sunglasses to her funeral despite being in the oft-cloudy Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It felt like I needed a reason to be there, so I brought my phone and videoed her funeral for my as-yet non-existant children who will never meet her. Doubtless her funeral wasn’t something I’d have been invited to while she was living, yet death is both a final estrangement and reunion. Due to our relationship in life, my mom’s passing was more relief and closure for me than it was grief.

Grieving Disconnection

In life my mom’s absence brought peace and a feeling of security, albeit with dread anticipation of her presence. Her presence brought chaos, instability, and unpredictability along an inevitable gradient to emotional abuse. Yet her absence and presence mutually denied me one thing: a parent capable of and committed to being a parent. No one else ever met the version of her that I knew, so totally different was her attitude towards other people.

As I grew up, I grew up without really ever seeing my home as a home. Not only uprooted, also disconnected from everyone and everything, especially my own Jewish family and heritage. Naturally this led to my ignorant lack of understanding and deep resentments that isolated me further. In that isolation I became kept, feeling more like a caged experiment that a mother’s child.

Finding Healing

After some terrible relationships and serious health problems, I took time to heal and grieve my upbringing. Healing is inarguably non-linear lifelong process, something our minds and bodies do, while we can intentionally practice healing deeply. That has been a painfully serious undertaking for me the past two years, though I have been on this path since 2021. And even before then I spent so much time learning embodied arts, to nourish my body, visiting both doctors and therapists. Still, the lasting sense of peace and sure knowledge of security only arrived as my mom passed.

As morbid as that might sound, the way she died was a death I’ve often feared for myself. Confronting that possibility for myself, I am grateful my mom died as she did and grateful for her teaching me something about life through her death. Looking down at her body empty of what was her, I felt an unburdening of that pain and less fear of mortality. Corpses have always haunted my mind and I’ve dreaded mortality since I was little. On some level I’ve always resonated with the idea that there is spiritual contagion in death. In Judaism, contact with dead bodies both human and other-than-human interacts with complex belief which parallel contagion.

Spiritual Contagion

While it’s true that literal disease can reside in corpses, mine was not a fear of some kind of plague. It was a fear beyond the rational in the deep ruminative spiral of my mind. Being released from that fear is the only gift my mom has given me worth carrying and cherishing. No physical gift could match the unburdening from that fear, so utterly crushing has it been.

I am also glad that she chose green burial instead of cremation or an even more ecologically impactful burial. I hope that someday the cemetary here will allow me to plant her grave with the native wild-flowers she loved, for her body to slowly entangle into over time.

Entangled Tales

I am not a physicist, yet I’ve read that heat destroys quantum entanglement, making cremation weirdly scarring, If there is a trace of what lived, even the trace of an echo, green burial grants continuity. Interestingly, another kind of entanglement persists in death, as I’ve been reading in Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life.

Fungi are often decomposers, built of ubiquituous microstructures called hyphae that combine like microscopic fibers into larger masses. Mushrooms are one such structure, yet hardly a universal strategy for fungi. Commonly hyphae weave themselves into lacy mycelial nets capable of moving nutrients and information. Fungi also love to interweave with plant roots or deeper still into plants’ own cells.

Not just plants, rather all life is within hyphae’s reach of the venerable fungi. In death fungi return our bodies to that mighty web of life, an undeniable connection to life’s cycle. In returning our bodies for our fungal friends to reunite with the Earth we enact a lasting stewardship, restful and redemptive.

Psychedelic Blessings

Judaism may have a place for fungal blessings in addition to curses, a connection I’ll explore more in anticipation of the Jewish month of Elul. As for the spiritual symptom of contagion of tzaraat often written about in the Torah, it’s as painful and destructive as any curse, yet that moldy affliction is not all fungi offer. Though Sheldrake references a folk medicine called “chamka” that is supposedly in the Talmud, psychedelics are the blessing he argues for the healing power of. While confined to being viewed with suspicion for decades, psychedelic mushrooms are now the basis of nearly-mainstream healing processes. Though Sheldrake describes some of his experiences with the eccentric Terrence McKenna, the science is serious and goes far beyond pioneering psychonauts.

Research has consistently shown that the fruits of these enigmatic lifeforms unharnesses our brains from controlling thought patterns. This in turn allows for a healing experience where one rearranges their mental connections. This rewiring often creates an experience I personally relate to being a single hypha in a vast interconnected mycelial lifeweb. It’s beyond a visceral or intellectual experience, a lasting reconnection to a sense of something universal. That experience is like a lifeline in a desert of despair, a door out of isolation, and peace with mortality.

Healing Eternally

Albeit eccentric, McKenna proposed that fungi could speak through our minds with mushrooms acting as messengers. And why not, given the complex chemical interactions that scientists have found? If hyphae carry information and people experiencing psychedelics journey through a spiritual death and rebirth, what if it’s a story of that endless cycle as witnessed by fungi? What if fungi remember through their entanglements with life and tell that story again and again inside human minds? While Sheldrake doesn’t delve deeply into the science of psychedelic experiences and understandably glosses over the details of how growing these mushrooms has become as easy as culinary oyster mushrooms, he perfectly describes this emerging field of medicine.

For many, the kind of healing one of my mom’s friends urged on me at her funeral, might be found in that same ancient fungal tale of death and rebirth. In Judaism, there’s a story about the Israelites dropping dead in their tracks and being returned to life, a story that may have a basis in psychedelic experiences more particular to Judaism. While that’s speculative, Sheldrake describes how psychedelic experiences helped McKenna and many other people through the deserts of their fears and the promise of community. That sense of connection breaks down the walls between people and helps them find connections through the substrate of their lives.

Similarly, my own experiences years ago helped me find the perspective to see my mom’s funeral as continuity, a return to universal existence. Despite wearing sunglasses and filming, I felt gratitude during her funeral instead of simply feeling disconnected. I find beauty that through slow decomposition hyphae record, retell, and remember her body’s story to pass onto roots via mycorrhizae and ever onward. I hope someday that story will ride the wind on the seeds of her beloved milkweeds, embroidered into their own story through those hyphae.

The post A Quantum Kaddish? What fungal networks teach us about grief, God and death appeared first on Green Prophet.