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128 Days Left - Language is Everything 30 July 2009

129 Days to Go - Where Has All the Music Gone?

I don't think I'm alone in believing that music played an important role in the era that gave us the civil rights movement, women's liberation, and the environmental movement (in North America, at least).

So is it just because I'm older now? Am I missing out on a whole generation of music about saving the world, stopping climate change, and fighting climate inequity and injustice?

Or is the music lacking ... and that's one of the reasons we're just not getting into people's heads — and hearts?

Well, better late than never, I just discovered Take Our Planet Back, by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. (He's the fellow who did Yes, We Can for Obama.) He debuted it at Al Gore's January 2009 Green Ball.

So, here it is, with lyrics below. Please pass it on. Let's create a soundtrack that we can listen to when we're old and crotchety and proudly say, "Yup, we did it. We beat that global warming and saved the world. We stood up and took our planet back!"

p.s. Does this song resonate for you? It's pretty, but my sense is that we need one that we can all sing along to.

Calling all the leaders to lead us out the hole

Asking all deceivers the things I want to know

If we're so technological

Why're we still burning oil?

'Cause I got a car you plug into the wall that's faster than a GTO

We shot for the stars, put rovers on Mars, make planes like UFOs

So why are we borrowin' money from China to buy oil from the Gulf and destroyin' the world?

Now that's got to change

(Chorus x3)

We'll stand up

We'll stand up and take our planet back


Talkin' 'bout we


Talkin' 'bout

Calling all the citizens

Citizens of the land

Ask your politicians

All these questions

If we fight another war on terror

Why aren't we fighting for the environment?

We spend a billion dollars on wars in foreign lands

But nothin' on education

Nikola Tesla turned the Niagara Falls into energy way back when

And we're still burning coal

When you can make electricity with solar and wind

Now who's getting played?


And who's getting paid?


I'm askin' all the citizens to take action

Take action and take back the government

Tell the government to start taxin' pollution

Makin' laws 'cause that's the solution

It should be against the law to make pollution

So if they make products that do what the other products do

But they didn't pollute, what are you gonna choose?
 Here is an excerpt from


by Mike Blanchfield, Canwest News Service

25 July 2009

p.s. See the rest of the article here.
 

Well, I'm starting to wonder....
 

Thank you, Summer, for all your gifts.
 26 July 2009

133 Days to Copenhagen - Three Upcoming Climate Change "Opportunities" for Youth

I'd like to share these three upcoming initiatives that youth who want to have their voices heard can participate in.

1. UNEP Tunza International Children and Youth Conference on the Environment

UNEP is sponsoring the biggest ever children and youth gathering on climate change in South Korea in August, to call for real action at the climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Although the "real" participants have already been selected, there seems to be an opportunity for virtual participation at a Global Town Hall on 20 August 2009 that will use state-of-the-art technology to link the gathering to hundreds of other young environmental leaders around the globe to agree on a message to deliver to world leaders.

The Seal the Deal! Global Town Hall will be facilitated by the Washington-based nonprofit Global Voices, which has pioneered the use of technology to convene large-scale deliberations to impact policy making.

For more information, see the UNEP Tunza International Children and Youth Conference on the Environment website.

2. Climate Neutrality with Honours - Climate Neutral Network

Universities are joining the Climate Neutral Network (CN Net), an initiative led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to promote global action to de-carbonize our economies and societies.

The first universities on board are the pioneers among hundreds of universities, colleges and other academic institutions worldwide that are taking steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote "greening" of their campuses and invest in low-carbon research and development.

UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner [quickly becoming a climate hero in my eyes!] said: "The Climate Neutral Network was inspired by a simple idea that a transformation to a low, even zero emission future is a learning process. It is therefore fitting that universities from all over the world should join this global networking platform and help make the best knowledge on climate neutrality available to all."

For information, visit the Climate Neutral Network.

3. YouthXchange E-Bulletin Seeking Contributions

The next e-bulletin of YouthXchange will focus on Youth and Sustainability. Everyone is asked to send their comments, stories and ideas to the YXC team at email@example.com. Check out the YouthXchange website, which they call "a training kit on responsible consumption." It's posing some serious questions and challenges to get people thinking about their consumption patterns.
 
134 Days to Go - Al Gore on why youth (and honesty) are so important to this movement

— Al Gore

(Note to Al: It's because they, and we, have allowed ourselves to be chained to our technologies. The greenies are too busy blogging to block bulldozers — and that's the last time I'll use alliteration like that, I promise.)

The thing to remember when Gore talks about the American civil rights movement in the video below is that global climate change has a deadline. And I mean a dead line.

This video is in honour of all the youth who are doing more than their share to wake up the world to the climate emergency.
 

Thanks, Lou. I know what you mean.
 

Here's what they have to say:
 
137 Days til Copenhagen - Gratitude to the Children 
138 Days to Go - Compassion for the Children On one single page of New Scientist of 27 June 2009, I came to realize that our compassion really needs to be (first, felt, and then) directed towards our children.

Did you know that 1 in 3 children aged 6 to 11 in an American poll said that they are afraid the Earth will cease to exist before they grow up because of global warming and other problems?

Sad but not surprising that children understand the urgency of the climate change issue — and feel it deeply. And don't argue that the Earth itself won't cease to exist. We are destroying the biosphere for practically all life, which is the equivalent of ceasing the Earth's existence — especially in a child's eyes.

Then, at the end of an opinion piece on the same page ("Methane First, OK?" about tackling methane as a serious greenhouse gas), a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley, writes: "This fruit [stopping methane emissions and leaks] is low-hanging, ripe and heavy with immediate benefits. Helping to pick it also means I can tell my grandchildren that, yes, I did do something to directly protect the planet."

Dear Professor: Your grandchildren don't want to hear that you did "something" to protect the planet. They want to know that you did everything you could to save the planet, and their future. And oh, when you say, "Reducing livestock ... would require changes in consumption" and toss it away as an immediate solution to a large percentage of methane emissions because there are other "fixes" that "do not directly threaten lifestyles," are you saying that lifestyles are more important than life? Are you admitting that you're not willing to give up meat as a gift to your grandchildren?

And beside that on the same page, Bjorn Lomborg (court jester cum bigmouth climate change urgency skeptic) is quoted as saying, "The current debate about global warming is clearly harmful. I believe that it is time we demanded that the media stop scaring us and our kids silly. We deserve a more reasoned, more constructive, and less frightening dialogue."

Oh dear. Poor Bjorn just doesn't get it. It's not the debate on global warming that is harmful! It's the bloody global warming itself that is harmful!

He and the other deniers have wasted the most important 20 years in the history of humanity. He is definitely on my list for crimes against humanity.

When this man calls for a dialogue that is more reasoned, more constructive and less frightening, it must mean he is going to start shutting up. Because he, with the others, has confused much of the developed world with his unreasonable, destructive and very scary denialist crap, instead of helping us get on with solving the crisis.

Please, let's hold the welfare of the children in our hearts at every step in this — yes, terrifying, dammit! —journey to salvation.
 
139 Days Left - Part 2 of Notes and Quotes on Compassion 

Bertrand Russell wrote:

Three passions have governed my life:

The longings for love, the search for knowledge,

And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.

In the union of love I have seen

In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision

Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.

I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].

I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,

But always pity brought me back to earth;

Cries of pain reverberated in my heart

Of children in famine, of victims tortured

And of old people left helpless.

I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,

And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.


 
140 Days to Copenhagen - Notes and Quotes on Compassion 

Arnold Schopenhauer said: Compassion is the basis of morality.
 
141 Days Left - Lessons from a Bat Our bat friend has gone. This little fellow (for some reason I always imagine him a male bat, but it could be a mother bat, according to some research I've been doing) is here every summer for six or eight weeks, and then one night he's just not here anymore.

Every evening, he heralds dusk and the setting of the sun. I enjoy listening for him and then checking the clock ... a bit later each night until the summer solstice, and then a bit earlier each night until his departure.

He makes the strangest screechy call, and an occasional otherworldly sound. (That first year, I thought it was a sick deer in the hills behind our house.) We still haven't figured out what kind of bat he is.

Just as Bat disappeared for us, he showed up in my sister's life at 4 in the morning, winging about her bedroom. That was quite the experience for her!

When I have an intimate encounter with an animal friend, I like to check out the Medicine Cards of Jamie Sams and David Carson. Bat, it turns out, often symbolizes rebirth in the Native American tradition.

This is timely symbolism for me as my stepmother, Jan, recently returned to the earth (death being the beginning of rebirth), and because we all need a reminder that it's time to let go of old habits and become reborn into a new form of civilization — one that is based on ethical economics, renewable energy technologies, and people everywhere caring about the future of the children of all species.

Here's to my stepmom, to bats, to our bat (until next summer), and to all who hold the vision of a reborn new future.