Dear Future Generations: Sorry

This Earth Day, activist and spoken word artist Prince Ea launched his newest online video entitled “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” to motivate young citizens to take immediate action to stop climate change by protecting threatened forests through the Stand for Trees campaign.

“Climate change is an emergency situation of the highest degree and all of us share the responsibility to do something about it,” said Prince Ea.

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Last month, Prince Ea traveled to Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to witness firsthand the horrors of tropical deforestation. He also visited pioneering forest conservation projects developed by Wildlife Works that demonstrate a successful new way to stop deforestation by rewarding forest communities who conserve their forests.

The Wildlife Works projects that Prince Ea visited in Kenya and the DRC represent two of twelve forest conservation projects participating in the new Stand for Trees campaign, an online initiative created by environmental NGO Code REDD that enables the general public to take direct action to combat climate change through crowd-funding the protection of threatened forests.

“Climate change is an emergency situation of the highest degree and all of us share the responsibility to do something about it,” said Prince Ea.

Climate scientists have warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 17 billion tonnes annually by 2020 to avoid increasing disastrous effects of climate change. The destruction of forests currently contributes more than 7 billion tonnes of emissions.

“I made this video to inform my generation that there is something we can do right now to take back our future; that is to take a Stand for Trees,” said Prince Ea.

Local chiefs and thousands of community members enthusiastically welcomed Prince Ea to the Congo Basin Forest, which made national news in the DRC.

“The Stand for Trees campaign was designed to put the power to save forests in the hands of the people to whom the future matters most: young people,” explained Mike Korchinsky, founder of Code REDD and founder and president of Wildlife Works.

Prince Ea’s “Dear Future Generations: Sorry”debuted on April 20th via social media and garnered 25 million views on Facebook in the first 36 hours of its release.

To learn more please visit StandforTrees.org.

Inspired by the Mars One mission, Citizens’ Climate Lobby is recruiting change agents who will commit to staying on Earth to make it liveable for human beings and other species:

With your help, our global community will legislate the right policies to accelerate the biggest transformation since the Industrial Revolution.

This Earth Day, Let’s Focus On Saving Humans

It’s a snowy and cold Earth Day morning in northwestern Ontario. On this Earth Day, Joe Romm over at Think Progress muses about renaming Earth Day – after all, it’s really humans and our civilization that is in peril at this point by our feckless, reckless and cavalier treatment of the ecosystem that gives us life.

graphic: Think Progress
graphic: Think Progress

Gaia, this amazing planet, has survived mass extinction events before – five other ones before this sixth one, that humans are on the verge of causing:

The culprits for the biodiversity loss include climate change, habitat loss, pollution and overfishing, the researchers wrote.

“Most of the mechanisms that are occurring today, most of them are caused by us,” Ferrer said.

So can we fix it? Yes, there’s time to cut dependence on fossil fuels, alleviate climate change and commit to conservation of habitat, the study scientists say. The more pressing question is, will we?

Barnosky and Ferrer both say they’re optimistic that people will pull together to solve the problem once they understand the magnitude of the looming disaster. Jablonski puts himself into the “guardedly optimistic category.”

“I think a lot of the problems probably have a lot more to do with politics than with science,” Jablonski said. (Read the full article on LiveScience.com)

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do the math graphic
graphic: 350.org

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Wondering where we’re at with climate change on Earth Day 2013? 350.org has just released  “Do The Math – the Movie”, and that’s how my family and I spent 45 minutes of our Earth Night yesterday. It was as inspiring to watch the movie as it was to see Bill McKibben live in Seattle when the Do The Math tour launched last November. If you’re wondering whether or not we can still make a difference at this late stage of the game, when we’re already feeling the effects of a destabilized climate, please take the time to watch it. If you’re feeling confused about the whole climate debate, and are wondering how to make sense of the science, as well as the accusations that the scientists raising the warning about climate change are “in it for the money”, please take the time to watch this movie. If you have children and/or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews that you care about, please take the time to watch this movie. If you are alive on planet earth at this moment in history, please take the time to watch this movie!

[youtube=http://youtu.be/IsIfokifwSo]

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Get outside and spend some time with Mother Earth on this Earth Day!