Nov 3, 2022

Tibet & Earth: Please help Lobsang Yangtso PhD & her team get to #COP27

I live thanks to water from Mt Baker (per Wikipedia "Mount Baker, also known as Koma Kulshan or simply Kulshan, is a 10,781 ft active glacier-covered andesitic stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc and the North Cascades of Washington in the United States.Wikipedia). Many people worldwide and wildlife are similarly graced with such natural wonders. Our leaders should immediately put a stop to the accelerating world temperatures or else we are finished. Please help Lobsang and her team get to COP27 in Egypt if you can. For a bit of information about the glaciers of Mt. Baker, please see the May 2020 article Mt. Baker Glaciers are Disappearing by Clara Deck in Whatcom Watch.

----- Forwarded message ----
From: Allison Johnson, SumOfUs <us@sumofus.org>
Date: Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 2:27 AM
Subject: Re: Lobsang Yangtso
To:

We helped Lobsang last year -- can you help do it again and make sure Tibet has a voice at the world's most important climate summit?

If you've saved your payment information with SumOfUs, your donation will go through immediately:

Donate $4 Donate another amount

Lobsang Yangtso escaped from Tibet by climbing over the Himalayas when she was just 9 years old.

Today, she's an environment and climate crisis expert with a Ph.D. And she's terrified about what is happening in her Tibetan homeland, where ice is melting 3x faster than anywhere else on the planet. As home to a glacier that provides water for 1 in every 5 people on Earth...we should all be terrified.

Lobsang wants to sound the alarm at the critical COP27 climate conference in Egypt, just a week away. But the high cost of attending means she and other front-line activists and experts are scrambling to ensure they can take part -- leaving the fossil fuel lobby to control the narrative and stop real action.

We can change that -- if thousands of us chip in, our community can send Lobsang to meet our leaders...and fund campaigning for real climate impact at the conference and beyond. Can you chip in to help?

If you've saved your payment information with SumOfUs, your donation will go through immediately:

Donate $4 Donate another amount

The world's biggest oil and gas companies will descend on COP27 in an all-out offensive to protect their profits. Their plan is to exploit the EU energy crisis to lock in gas as a path forward instead of actual clean energy. And if they succeed, it will mean we continue down our currently catastrophic pathway to 2.5+ degrees of heating.

Imagine what it would mean for the next generation.

The good news is we know what we have to do to win: centre the stories of those on the front lines of climate disaster to show world leaders that the cost of inaction is just too high.

But a combination of travel costs and visa complexities makes it very tough for the people we most need at the table to get there.

Lobsang knows exactly what is happening to the environment in Tibet and has witnessed firsthand the impact of the climate crisis in this fragile and vital land.

If we're going to have a shot at taking on the massive oil and gas lobby, we need voices like Lobsang's at COP27. Can you give just a small amount to send Lobsang and her team to Egypt?

If you've saved your payment information with SumOfUs, your donation will go through immediately:

Donate $4 Donate another amount

The threats we face are a matter of life or death. If we don't slam the brakes on runaway climate change, our future is extreme weather, food shortages, and millions displaced. The next few months will decide if we succeed or fail, but to win we need to centre the voices of the communities with everything at stake.

The SumOfUs community has come together time and time again to stand in solidarity with communities risking everything to change the world -- from the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon to Bangladeshi labour organisers to communities across the globe taking on corporate power. We even helped Lobsang attend last year's climate conference. Let's do it again to save the planet we all call home.

Thanks for all that you do,
Allison, Sondhya and the SumOfUs team

More information:

Cop27 climate summit: window for avoiding catastrophe is closing fast, The Guardian. 30 October 2022.

Why are the glaciers in southeast Tibet melting so fast?, Phys.org. 08 September 2022.

SumOfUs is a worldwide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy.

May 31, 2012

Trees

I am a tree planting partner of the Billion Tree Campaign. Everybody can do something :-)

From: Lantern Books Blog <laura@lanternmedia.net>

Date: Thu, May 31, 2012 at 5:19 AM
Subject: Lantern Books Blog

Lantern Books Blog

Planting a Tree for Life

Posted: 31 May 2012 04:00 AM PDT

David Kidd: He's never met a seedling he didn't want to plant

On the face of it, Wangari Maathai and David Kidd might not seem to have much in common.

One is a former Vietnam veteran and Transcendental Meditator; the other was a social justice and women's rights campaigner from Kenya who was the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Yet both had an abiding passion and concern. They both feared the collapse of the world's ecosystems and the advent of global warming, and both found an answer to it: They planted trees. Millions of them. David Kidd planted twelve million trees throughout the United States as part of his American Free Tree program. Wangari Maathai planted forty million trees throughout Kenya with the Green Belt Movement, her grassroots environmental and civil rights movement that not only reforested whole swathes of her country but was instrumental in overturning the corrupt regime that ruled Kenya for twenty-five years.

Kidd and Maathai were both Arbor Day Foundation award winners and both understood that planting trees didn't have to be left to the experts. Anyone could do it. They also knew that something happens when you plant a tree: it stimulates a reverence for, and love of, the planet that can drive not only you, but everyone involved with your ideals, to work harder for their community, their county, their state, their country, and beyond that for the planet as a whole. You can visit each of their websites, linked with their names at the beginning of this entry, to support their work.

In Growing America, David Kidd reveals the secrets behind effective community organizing and how to transform the desolate and polluted corners, medians, and sidings of the US into green and productive land. In The Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai reveals the struggles and triumphs of her campaign to reforest Kenya and how you can start your own Green Belt Movement campaign. Both books save trees as well. They are published, like many Lantern Books, on at least fifty percent post-consumer waste, chlorine-free, recycled paper!

For more on World Environment Day, click here.