With her skin feeling the crawl of worldwide land development, air and land pollution, probing and scouring for minerals, expansion of road networks, wars, she may feel it as a nasty rash - the worst kind of itchy. 

 

 If she's anything like me, she's peeved she has it, wondering how in the heck it got so bad. To discover that nothing she did brought on the rash, but many others, in fact billions of people, did, she'd be furious. Is global warming the slow burn of her anger? Who knows? I once had a co-worker who got angry enough to make a room full of people feel the heat, and he's no planet. 

 

 My mother uses lotion to control her skin problems. So do I on my baby's backside. We have solutions.

 

But what about Mother Earth? She's squirming for relief. Here's the rub: Each of us is responsible to her. We need her. For that each of us can play a part in applying solutions to her woes? Whether it's through recycling, driving a hybrid car, buying in bulk, buying products free of chemicals, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics, using wind or solar power, there are itches of hers we can scratch and, with enough of us scratching, perhaps the itch will go away. 

 

 A look around our region shows that the scratching has begun. In this issue, we take a look at a handful of Four Corners' people, organizations and businesses that have stepped up to help lessen our impact on the environment thus decreasing the region's carbon footprint. 

 

 While researching "Green Steps," contributing editor Amy Maestas said she had enough material to write several feature-length articles. That's good news, more of which we'll bring to you in following issues of Inside/Outside Southwest magazine, a local's guide to what's really up in the Four Corners.