Community | April 22, 2011 | 24 comments

Earth Day-Every Day

source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jP8CC2rKj4&feature=player_embedded

JanforGore
Looking realistically upon the state of our planet on this day of appreciation for our Earth, humans have been grossly negligent regarding its stewardship. From our seeds of life to the state of our air, water and land we have forgotten how precious the gifts she gives us truly are. We prod, poke, drill, pollute, toxify and alter for profit the only home we have in some vain attempt to show that we are onmipotent over nature as if it is somehow our enemy. As if we are angry as its awesome power and jealous of its beauty. As if doing so bestows some sort of importance upon us in our arrogance, and loneliness. How did this come to be? When did this planet that provides our sustenance and very life become something to be vanquished and destroyed?

How is it that pieces of green paper are more important than a clean river teeming with life running to and from its source, or nutrient rich soil that provides generations of species with life, or trees that provide us a shield to the biodistress that we have exacerbated to dangerous levels?

For me Earth Day is every day, but hopefully for many this day will be a day where reflection takes place in connecting the dots of how important the web of life is from the smallest phytoplankton in our oceans to the largest mammal on land. For that is where it all begins. In respecting that web of life and its importance to our own lives we understand how rare and precious life is and how quickly it can be gone.

Our Earth has taken many blows from man and continues to suffer from our greed, apathy, indifference and selfishness. But I do see a glimmer of hope- in our children. In those who will inherit what we have made and in my own child who I have raised to care about the future just as much as I do. It is through their eyes that we can see the world we were meant to have and the world that with coming full circle in consciousness we can still have if we really want it.

This beautiful video relays the wonders of our only home. May it inspire those who see it to understand the symbiosis between us and the Earth, the water, the air and the land that is us.
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24 comments // Earth Day-Every Day // Video

  • remanns
  • Gravity_Man
    • +1
      Gravity_Man  

    • Great video too Jan. This morning got up, sitting on the couch when a little bird outside started chirping, then it chirped it again almost verbatim, then a 3rd time the same. It sounded like a parent repeating orders to children who don't want to listen.

      I was stunned. I had heard language from a bird.

      Cold fusion is in the pipeline. Crude oil's cup runneth out.

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  
    • Gravity_Man:

      Thanks. Yes, they are speaking to us in many ways, and we aren't listening. The birds, the bees, the fish, the lions, the penquins, the polar bears. They all see the signs because they are close to nature. We have cut ourselves off, and therefore have lost touch. We must reconnect in order to save ourselves.

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • Gravity_Man
    • +1
      Gravity_Man  
    • JanforGore:

      Here's a good page on the Leaf => http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-electric-car/index

      The radio said last night it has a range of just 100 miles per overnight charge, but that will change once they add an onboard electric power plant. My engine would do that but I'm sure there's others too. They'll have it running 24/7 soon enough. Gets up to 90 mph too! Fast, they said.

      Change we can believe in oops.

    • 1 year ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  

    • Radioactive wastes used in munitions to superheat (and through tank sides) can't be fixed by planting posies in the yard. Driving a leaf down the highway is a good start though...

    • 1 year ago
  • JETaylor
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  
    • JETaylor:

      What is the cause of your trees dying? Are they beyond saving? I think the video shares a secret with us. That nature is the key to all life and working with her is the key to ours. We can still plant trees that will live.

    • 1 year ago
  • JETaylor
    • 0
      JETaylor  
    • JanforGore:

      I don't know why the trees are dying.(15 trees died in the last 10 years ) I still have plenty of life left in the yard. I have a natural pond and I've learned that the only way to keep it healthy and clean is to have a perfect balance of nature.

    • 1 year ago
  • ninetyseven
  • JanforGore
  • ninetyseven
    • 0
      ninetyseven  

    • We prod, poke, drill, pollute, toxify and alter for profit the only home we have in some vain attempt to show that we are onmipotent over nature as if it is somehow our enemy
      PROFIT.....is the only reason why !

    • 1 year ago
  • artemis6
  • remanns
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  

    • On this special Earth Day 2011 i can't help but think of our great grandmother Earth, Gaia, nailed to a cross for the sins of humanity.

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
  • futuregen
    • +1
      futuregen  

    • AMY GOODMAN: We saw you in Cochabamba last year when we were covering the conference, the gathering of tens of thousands of people around the rights of Mother Earth, Pachamama, as they said there. Why is Bolivia and Ecuador taking the lead here?

      MAUDE BARLOW: Well, partly because they have governments that actually represent a lot of the will of their people. And I can’t imagine what that feels like. We’re going through an election in Canada, and we’re just tearing our hair out, because we’re going to get a bad government again. So I think, partly, you’ve just got a government closer to the needs of the people.

      But the Andes are melting. I mean, we have a crisis. A brand new study last week from the Foundation of U.S. Scientists said that La Paz, which is the capital of Bolivia, is in great crisis with a terrible drought threatening the two million inhabitants because of climate crisis. And unless something dramatic changes in a very short period of time, they don’t see any way around this. So it’s affecting their food, it’s affecting their access to water. So it’s very immediate. When you have this kind of immediacy, I think people like the president of Bolivia, Morales, and his ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón, just say, "I don’t care if you like me or not. I’m not particularly here for a popularity contest. I’m here because we’re talking about life and death of the people where we live. And we need to get that urgency out there." And that was—it was Bolivia that led the charge on getting the right to water recognized. And so, similarly, very interesting that it would be the same government—it was Bolivia that said no to the so-called consensus that happened in Cancún, which was based on a market model for the so-called solution to climate. So—

      AMY GOODMAN: And what’s wrong with the market model?

      MAUDE BARLOW: The market—well, Vandana will have so much to say, too. But basically, the—and the U.N. has just put a huge price tag on nature now. The whole answer, not just to climate crisis, but to the water crisis and the forest crisis, is to put a dollar figure on nature and bring nature into the market system, so that basically all of nature has to compete with other uses for it in order to survive. And it basically—it’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a recipe for the wealthy of the world and the powerful within countries claiming, well, they’re, you know, so much more than others and so much more than nature.

      http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/22/earth_day_special_vandana_shiva_and

    • 1 year ago
  • futuregen
  • JanforGore
  • futuregen
    • +1
      futuregen  
    • Image

    • http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/22/earth_day_special_vandana_shiva_and

      MAUDE BARLOW: " And what we’re trying to say is that if we’re really going to survive as a species, and if the planet is to survive in any condition as we understand it, we have to shift our thinking and stop thinking of ourselves as being above nature and stop thinking of ourselves as having the rights that no other species has or no other form of the earth has. We just have to change. What would the world look like if we could see it differently? Right now, for most environmentalists, the best we ever get is that we negotiate the amount of toxics being dumped into a particular system, or in the tar sands, all we’re—I mean, all we’ve ended up doing is having a series of reports, which just tell us how bad it is, but we haven’t—we have not managed to stop one pipeline. We have not managed to stop one government expansion, one corporate expansion, in the tar sands in all the years we’ve been fighting it. And I don’t see, frankly, Amy, how we’re going to do that, unless we have a mindset change. I really—I think right now it’s just a negotiation about how much of this toxic waste we’re going to allow and dump into our waters and our air and how much genetic damage we’re going to do as—

      AMY GOODMAN: And the mind shift would be what? What do you see needs to happen?

      MAUDE BARLOW: The mind shift is that we are a species like any other and that we will not survive unless we place our rights in tandem with the rights of the earth, and then we understand that we come from the earth. Everything we have, everything we wear, everything we eat, everything we touch comes from the earth. And if we don’t change our minds, if we don’t change the way we see the world, if we don’t stop thinking of ourselves as superior, we’re not going to survive. And I see it as an evolutionary step, a human—an evolutionary step in our human development, if we could actually come to this."

    • 1 year ago
  • futuregen
    • +1
      futuregen  
    • Image

    • http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/22/earth_day_special_vandana_shiva_and

      AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, you’ve been taking on corporations in India and around the world, but talk about the corporatization of nature.

      VANDANA SHIVA: I think the consequences of the corporatization of nature is, first and foremost, that at a time where we should be recognizing the integrity of nature, the prior rights of nature, nature’s generosity, the generosity of the earth to provide us life itself, we are going headlong into the path of hallucination, where we’ve assumed we are not just separate, but we are continuing the idea of mastery and conquest over nature, adding to the technological tools, like the idea that we can control nature through nuclear power. Now we want to control nature through market mechanisms and commodification.

      Why is that wrong? Firstly, it’s wrong because nature is too rich, too diverse. We know too little about it. So, whatever price we’ll put will be partial. It’ll never catch the whole story. We have not even begun to find out the soil organisms that give us food. We don’t know how different species hang together in a forest to create that amazing biodiversity of the forest. So it will be linear. It will just be just carbon functions, when that’s not the only function of a forest. And it will definitely not take into account the integrity of species. I started Navdanya and saving seeds when I found out that corporations wanted to patent life, when life is not created by them. It is created sui generis. It is part of creation.

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  

    • Great song and video!
      Today I planted two native American Hazelnut trees in my back yard for the wildlife.
      It's amazing how many large trees and bushes you can fit on a half acre - 62 big trees and 55 bushes and there is still room for more! It's becoming a forest with a dozen 75' tall hemlocks, three huge maples, three giant sequoias, an amazing dawn redwood, white birch, blue spruce, native holly, a pin oak, dogwoods, white pines, Alberta spruce, wild cherry, yews, azalias, rhododendrons, ilex, juniper, hawthorn, japonica, black bamboo and a big old gnarly Indian pine.
      It's my little slice of paradise.
      Happy Earth Day every day!

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
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