Beginning with the July/August 2008 issue, Life Learning and Natural Child magazines are being reintegrated back into Natural Life magazine, where they began over three decades ago. Natural Life is one of the oldest and most respected natural lifestyle publications in North America and a pioneer in the fast growing field of healthy, sustainable family living.

A large overlap has developed among subscribers, contributors and advertisers of our three magazines. Some people have told us that they have, at times, been confused as to which one of our magazines they were reading! The merger will eliminate the redundancies and put into practice the important ecological principle that less is more. Subscribers will only have to pay for one subscription and advertisers will reach a larger audience of like-minded people. Importantly, our collective ecological footprint will also be smaller. At the same time, Life Learning readers will benefit from editorial with a wider perspective, informed by the idea that life learning is a philosophy of life, rather than a style of homeschooling.

When we launched Natural Life magazine in 1976, the purpose was twofold. We wanted a home-based enterprise that would allow us to facilitate the life learning of our two daughters and we wanted to provide readers with information about sustainable family living and unschooling. For 32 years now, we have explored ways to eat lower on the food chain; to build smaller, more energy-efficient homes; to birth our children at home, to educate them there as well, and to live with them in a loving and non-coercive manner. Natural Life’s mission has been to demonstrate how these are not restrictions, but exciting opportunities to create social and environmental sustainability by choosing the least harmful ways of living on this finite planet and by building new paradigms.

The combined magazine will inspire and inform with even more personal experiences about how families are making the planet a better place to live. The July/August issue is in the mail preparation stage and has been sent to the newsstand distributors. Meanwhile, we have made a preview available. You'll see the regular Life Learning columnists and contributors, as well as some other articles by unschoolers...with a few exceptions, we bet you won't be able to tell which articles were originally intended for Life Learning, Natural Child or Natural Life! We actually think it's a bit uncanny how much overlap there is.

We hope that the Life Learning community will continue to thrive, both through Natural Life magazine and this website, where we will be posting new articles on a regular basis – some of which will be website exclusives.

Current subscribers to Life Learning will now receive Natural Life. (If you already have a Natural Life and/or Natural Child subscription, it will be extended appropriately.) And if you are not a current Life Learning subscriber, we hope you will consider subscribing to Natural Life Magazine!

Wendy and Rolf Priesnitz, Life Media

P.S.  Here's some of the early reaction we've received.