Make the Provincial Government Keep Their Promise on the Great Bear Rainforest

November 21st, 2008, 4 Comments »

The Forest CanopyThis qualifies as a client plug, I suppose, but it’s a cause that’s really close to my heart.

We’re doing some work with Greenpeace Canada, Sierra Club of BC and ForestEthics on the continuing campaign to save BC’s Great Bear rainforest.

The Great Bear Rainforest is a huge swath of the land–the size of Austria–on BC’s central coast. It’s home to three kinds of bears, six million migratory birds, 3000 genetically distinct salmon stocks and many species of plants unique to the region. Most importantly, it’s the largest tract of intact coastal temperate rainforest left on Earth.

As you may recall, there was a landmark agreement in 2006 among various stakeholders–the provincial government, logging companies, First Nations and environmentalists. They agreed to a new approach to resource planning developed by an independent team of scientists, and committed to its implementation by March 31, 2009. But we’re not (ahem) out of the woods yet. From the petition:

A couple of years ago, Premier Campbell made a very specific commitment to preserve this precious rainforest. The final countdown is on for the BC government to make their promise a reality by the March 31, 2009 deadline. Premier Campbell needs to hear from you.

We are down to the wire. Unless all elements of the promise are kept, the ecological health of the rainforest will be in jeopardy once again. We’ve come so far towards the rare success of having a vast unspoiled forest safeguarded, let’s not undermine all this good work by not reaching the finish line.

Give Me an Early Christmas Present: Sign This Petition

If you can spare 37 seconds, I’d really appreciate it if you would sign the petition urging the government of BC to keep their promises regarding this precious region. You don’t have to be from BC, either–support from other parts of the globe really helps.

If you’re keen to help beyond signing the petition, consider any of the following:

Thanks to Emily, Raul, Monique, Rebecca and everybody else who has written about the campaign thus far. We’re making good progress, but we’ve got a ways to go.

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Bronchioles, Trees or Coastline?

November 2nd, 2007, 10 Comments »

I’m agnostic. But if I wanted to find evidence of a Intelligent Designer in nature, I’d look at more images like this:

Bronchial Tubes, Trees or Coast Lines?

I made this image by rotating, blurrying and greyscaling this satellite photo of the coast of Greenland. I saw it on this recently-Dugg blog post, and was immediately struck by how tree-like the fjords and inlets looked.

I showed it to Julie, and she immediately thought of bronchioles, the tubes in your lungs.

I know I sound like a New Age hippie, but this sort of thing kind of blows my mind. It’s amazing and profound that we humans can recognize these recurring micro and macro patterns in nature.

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Saving the Rain Forest in Second Life

July 13th, 2007, 1 Comment »

The folks at Converseon (a competitor to Capulet, I guess), pitched me on their project to save rare trees via Second Life. This video pretty much explains the whole shebang:

If you’re an American Express card holder, they want you to vote on the project so that it can obtain funding.

There are a slough of creative social change projects in Second Life. Another one I learned about at Northern Voice last year was a project to sell virtual yaks to buy animals for actual Tibetan families. The virtual yak gave virtual milk. What was cooler, though, was that they hadn’t done any walking animation for the yak, so it was more of a HoverYak™.

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