Click the link and follow for fresh thoughts and ideas, opinions and updates from the network of Wild Earth Adventures. It is actually pretty interesting once you understand the language. Don’t take it too seriously or spend too much time on it. Twitter like other social media is how an increasing number of people are connecting. Social media is here to stay, in one form or another. So why not get connected and see what all the fuss is about?

http://www.ecotourism.org

spOIL  follows the International League of Conservation Photographers as they team up with the Gitga’at Nation of British Columbia to document the Great Bear Rainforest before an oil pipeline changes it forever. Go to pacificwild.org to help protect this beautiful place. Bella Coola is the gateway to the Great Bear Rainforest and we encourage you to watch this film with fantastic footage of the bears and wildlife of this pristine frontier.

There are lots of incredible places to see on earth. I often think that Canada is overlooked by world travellers, which surprises me. Always being drawn to off the beaten track destinations and wild places, North America epitomises wilderness. And Bella Coola is the ultimate location. Remote, vast, pristine and no tourists.

A few words to try and summarize this amazing place:

If you can picture Norway with grizzly bears roaming through the backyards and vast untouched forests, you are getting close to imagining Bella Coola. Although it’s not the bears that most people worry about here, it’s the cougars aka mountain lions. The valley residents are a mix of indigenous peoples and Norwegian settlers, the latter enticed here by the wild beauty that is reminiscent of the mountains and fjordlands of their homeland.

The community continues to thrive from the ecologically important salmon run as well as some small scale farming and hunting in the mountains. It is one of the most self-sufficient communities in North America. And wildest. On the edge of the Great Bear Rainforest and the Pacific Coast Mountain Range, Bella Coola is a gateway to some of the least explored wilderness in North America, south of the tundra zones.

It is somewhere that everyone must see.

Studies show that positive immune benefits can last up to a month after a visit to the woods.

October 2011, http://www.experiencelifemag.com/issues/october-2011/wellness/how-forests-boost-immunity.php

New research shows that besides lowering blood pressure and pulse rate, and reducing levels of the stress hormone cortisol, spending time in nature boosts your immune system, too.

In a study in Japan, 12 healthy men between the ages of 37 and 55 took a three-day, two-night trip to the forest. On the first day, the men spent two hours in the afternoon walking in the forest. On the second day, they walked in the forest for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. Blood samples tested on days two and three showed that in 11 of the 12 men there was a 50 percent increase in natural killer cells. These cells are one of the main components of the immune system, and they play a central role in fighting tumors and viruses. Further studies show that these positive immune benefits can last up to a month after a visit to the woods.

Researchers believe that the increase in natural killer cells is in part a response to phytoncides, the essential oils in wood that help protect it from insects and rotting. In Japan, where the studies were first conducted, the practice, dubbed “forest bathing,” has become so popular that the government there is creating official “forest therapy” sites, and companies are adding “forest therapy” to their health plans.