The new Sustainable Valentine's Day: August 14!

Image by Getty Images via @daylifePlan ahead now: tell your sweetie that, henceforth, you won't be pitching woo with those air-freighted hothouse flowers in February, but you'll deliver a much more loving gift under the sun on August 14, when the flowers around Salem are so mind-bogglingly beautiful that you'll wonder why you ever settled for the imports.

It's time to say a firm no! to fossil-fuel-flowers, the kinds grown in South America and shipped via jet airplane up to northern markets in the dead of winter.

Let's start a new kind of peace movement right here in the city named for peace, a movement about stopping the war against climate stability, a movement about making peace with the beautiful and bountiful place we live by acting carefully to protect it against our excesses and outmoded habits. Instead of just keepin' on the old ways, let's be smart, and time-shift Valentine's Day six months, to August, when there is a glorious abundance of gorgeous flowers throughout the Willamette Valley, and a real dearth of holiday celebrations.

Support local farms and growers with your dollars, keep your money circulating around you and enriching your own community, instead of sending it on an airplane to fly straight into the pockets of the oil companies and Wall St.