More Green

I've been learning lately that everything is connected. You, me, them. Social justice and environmental justice cannot be considered apart. The rich and the poor are in it together. A healthy environment has rebounding effects in every direction whereas a degraded environment has the opposite effect in every direction. To oversimplify; green things, be it trees on your street or a forest near your school or plants in your room have subtle effects on everything from air quality, human behavior, water drainage, humidity, health, aesthetics and even greenhouse gases I suppose.

The world is currently looking for ways to encourage more green. Examples include carbon credit trading, ecosystem valuation, urban agriculture and "green" everything, from dish soap to toilet paper to bullets. Yes, like for a gun. Some of these schemes are disingenuous but this one is not:

The school where I volunteered in Ecuador ("All Smiles, Snotty Noses and Eager Eyes") is trying to raise some money to save the stand of forest next to the school, valued more as timbre than as green.

If you have you ever been asked to donate to a cause and have been unsure whether to do it or not because you don't know how much of the money is going to the cause and how much is going into "administrative costs?" here's your chance to donate directly without doubt to good people for a good cause. Take a minute out of your busy schedule and click below even just to read about the school and project. And give a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, if you have it. Donating online through paypal is safe and easy and immensely effective in a world where the internet cuts through boundaries and barriers of communication so incisively. Click this goddamn link:

http://katitawa.blogspot.com/2010/02/blog-post.html

Though it is likely that you will breathe some of the good clean oxygen produced by those trees, you will probably never see Kimberley, Marcia and Alex except in the picture below. You may never even be in the same country let alone meet Robert, the 78 year old American man, dedicated founder of the school or the community of Ecuadorians young and old that will see these trees everyday. But you can rest assured they exist nonetheless and that everything is connected.