Today is Blog Action Day (see www.blogactionday.org), where bloggers all around the world are writing about the environment.

Astrology has an interesting view of the environment in that distance is irrelevant. From an astrological standpoint, the environment of Earth isn't separate from the environment of the Solar System, the Galaxy, and the Universe. Nor is the environment of Earth separate from the environment inside you.

A birthchart is a map of the environment. Specifically, it's a map of the environment that we term the Solar System, with the Earth at the centre of the map. Simultaneously, it's a map of your inner environment. The two are one, so to speak.

So your internal environment is revealed by the external environment. We're used to thinking that the environment around us affects us physically and psychologically, but astrology confirms a reciprocal relationship, a two-way street. The implications of that are profound.

You can map your psyche on the surface of the Earth, as articles on this blog and the affiliated website have shown. Not only do you meet you internal environment in the external environment, but you are also 'tuned in' to certain places on the planet, and it's not random or just happenstance. You have a special relationship with some places, and that relationship means that you can influence those places, as well as be influenced by those places. In some part of you, you know what's going on in that part of the world, even if you haven't heard or read or seen it on the news, and that part of the world responds in some way to how you respond to what's going on there. Environmentalism can be very personal, and the personal can be very environmental.

So whatever you do to the environment, you do to yourself in the long run, and whatever you do to yourself, you do to the environment. To pollute the environment around us is to pollute the environment within us, and vice versa. To take care of the environment around us is to take care of the environment within us, and vice versa. And soon we'll perhaps realise that to take care of, or pollute, the Solar System, is to extend the same relationship one ripple out. The distant is local, and the local is distant. 'NIMBYism' - Not In My Back Yard - takes on a new dimension. The whole world is your back yard, and your back yard is the whole world. Gandhi's famous statement echoes this: "We must be the change we want to see in the world."