As we learn more about living mutualistically with nature, we find an increasing number of things in our lives that we need to change. In the 1960s, for example, the world learned about CFCs in hairspray and what those chemicals were doing to our ozone layer. So, in 1987, 197 countries banded together to sign the Montreal Protocol, removing chlorofluorocarbons from household products. In the 1970s DDT was outlawed in the U.S. after environmental scientists, chiefly Rachel Carson in her momentous Silent Spring, exposed the pesticide’s bioaccumulation in wildlife.

Read more from Lauren Chappell with San Marcos Greenbelt Alliance here.