As I recently mentioned, today is Blog Action Day. Ironically, because it’s Blog Action Day and I’m involved in the TckTckTck campaign, I don’t have a lot of free time to write a long, heart-rending blog post about the dangers of climate change.
Instead, I want to share this great video that the local video-meisters at Giant Ant Media created for TckTckTck. It speaks for itself:
I usually wouldn’t be a big fan of a video full of cute kids, but this one jibes with our philosophy and theory of change for TckTckTck. It’s reportedly brought the occasional person to tears, which is a pretty good result for 80 seconds.
In the next couple of weeks, there are two big climate change-related events that I wanted to mention.
First up, this Thursday is Blog Action Day, a day on which a bunch of bloggers agree to all write about the same topic. This year, that topic is climate change (over at TckTckTck, we pushed hard to make that happen).
If you’re a blogger, please consider joining Blog Action Day and, this Thursday, writing about climate change. If you do, you can find plenty of helpful assets associated with the TckTckTck campaign. We’ve got a bunch of evocative photos on our Flickr stream, and a mega YouTube playlist of great videos.
Bridge to a Cool Planet
October 24 is the Global Day of Climate Action, where people all over the planet engage in thousands of actions–flash mobs, parades, protests and other events–to call for a fair, binding and ambitious climate treaty. This two-minute video (featuring an awesome Sigur Ros song) explains:
The biggest event that I’m aware of locally is Bridge to a Cool Planet. The northbound lanes of the Cambie Street Bridge will be closed to traffic, and people will walk north across the bridge and then east over to Science World, where there will apparently be festivities throughout the afternoon.
The excellent people at the Surrey International Writers Conference have kindly shuffled the schedule around so that I can come down and take part for a couple of hours in the afternoon. If you’re in the vicinity during the actual walk, drop me a tweet or text.
Many years ago, my friend convinced me that the Cambie Street Bridge, though least attractive, has the best views of any bridge on the south side of downtown. That’s a bonus to the whole fighting climate change business, but the views alone are worth the walk.
As I’ve mentioned in passing a couple of times, I’m excited to be working with the TckTckTck campaign. It’s an unprecedented coalition of global NGOs (Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF, Amnesty International among others–here’s a complete list on the website or Twitter) dedicated to urging world leaders to agree to a binding, fair and ambitious deal in Copenhagen this December, where they’ll negotiate the sequel to the Kyoto Protocol.
There’s a series of global events happening over the next three months. The first of these is the Global Wake Up Call, more than 2000 flash mobs and other events that occur all over the world next Monday, September 21. There are 188 events happening in Canada, and at least a dozen–like this one–are happening around Vancouver. If you’re looking to do something over lunchtime next Monday, maybe you’d like to join one?
Blog Action Day is a single day–October 15–when bloggers write about a particular topic in order to raise awareness. Last year’s topic was poverty, and these were the results:
12,800 Bloggers
14,053 Blog Posts
13,498,280 Readers
17 Top 100 Blogs
I urge you to spare 26 seconds to complete the survey and choose ‘climate change’ as the topic of choice. Why?
October 24 is an International Day of Climate Action, so having the Blog Action Day on October 15 seems like a nice coincidence.
This December world leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to negotiate the sequel to the Kyoto agreement, so it’s a critical time for the issue.
In my estimation, climate change is the most urgent issue facing our planet. It’s already allegedly responsible for 300,000 deaths a year, and has far-reaching impacts through extreme weather, political destabilization, famine and so forth.
It’s a topic near and dear to my heart. Capulet is currently working on the TckTckTck campaign, a global climate change movement–more on that later.
Just a mini link round-up, as there’s a few items I’ve been meaning to mention:
Rebecca, along with about 25 other local bloggers, is participating in a Blogathon on July 25. It’s “24 hours of blogging every 30 minutes for a cause”. An excellent idea, and had I a more formidable constitution (and time to recover), I’d do it too. I’ll just have to satisfy myself with donating to the cause. You should, too.
Capulet is currently a cog in the giant advocacy machine that is TckTckTck. More on that later, but in the meantime, they’re hiring for a blogger/online campaigner role. It would be a kick-ass job for the next six months.
