The Tree Is A Four Letter Word Campaign Launches as Part of the 2012 Jason Mraz North American Tour, Aims to Support Local Environmental Organizations and Engage and Inspire Fans to Take Action
PORTLAND, ME -- (Marketwire) -- 08/08/12 -- Environmental non-profit REVERB has announced a partnership with Jason Mraz on a new program titled Tree Is A Four Letter Word. The name is a play on Mraz's latest album title, Love Is A Four Letter Word.
For fans, each concert will include a REVERB Eco-Village to visit on the way into the show where attendees will be able to engage with their local tree-focused non-profit groups, donate for a souvenir sticker, and volunteer for tree projects in their community. Fans who participate onsite at the show will be able to win prizes including a two-week eco-adventure for one winner and a friend to India, an autographed Taylor guitar as well as reusable bottles and other prizes from the Brita FilterForGood Music Project. Additionally, in select markets Jason will be getting his hands dirty by participating in community tree projects with fans and local non-profits.
In an effort to also support global tree planting projects, fans throughout the venue and online will be encouraged to text "tree" to 85944 to make a $5 donation to re-green degraded land in impoverished communities in Burundi and Kenya via the Green World Campaign. An interactive "treemometer" will be shown on venue screens and online to show real-time progress of the "Mraz Fan Forest."
Mraz is an enthusiastic supporter of REVERB's mission and says, "I'm so excited to be working with REVERB to provide fans a platform to get involved, and support community-based organizations both locally and around the world."
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Shark humor has its time and place, but not when I'm snorkeling somewhere called Shark Bay. At the Heron Island Research Station, a laboratory on the teardrop-shaped atoll 45 miles (72 km) off Australia's east coast, the suntanned, chirpy station manager gives a parting wave to the three students who are taking me out for my first look at the legendary corals of the Great Barrier Reef. "Just don't get eaten, will you?" she says. Ha-ha. Happily, there are no sharks in Shark Bay that morning; in fact, there's not a whole lot of anything. As I follow the students' snorkels, we pass over circular beds of brown, monochromatic coral and empty expanses of rippled sand. A handful of small, glimmering fish hover in the water column, but they're the only life we see during an hour-long swim. Where are the schools of coral trout? The famed Maori wrasse? Wading back to shore, one of the students shrugs: "Sorry there wasn't more."...
On Feb. 25, I posted a blog arguing that nuclear weapons are the most important and urgent environmental threat today—even more important than climate change caused by greenhouse gasses. I received quite a bit of feedback from environmentalists—many of whom took umbrage with my thesis.
Interestingly, no one argued that the predictions of climate change following a limited nuclear war (50-100 Hiroshima-sized bombs) was unsound—after all, scientists use some of the same climate modeling techniques to predict the global cooling from nuclear fallout and soot as they use to chart the future of global warming from carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. Many environmentalists felt simply that the chances of nuclear war were so small that worrying about its effect on the climate was a waste of time. Joe Romm's sentiments on the Climate Progress blog were typical: "So the scenario being offered is that some accident or other event leads to India and Pakistan suicidally using most of their nuclear weapons on each other. Something to worry about? Absolutely. Likely? Not terribly. Preventable through the political efforts of U.S. environmentalists? Gimme a break!"...
WASHINGTON — Even a small nuclear exchange could ignite mega-firestorms and wreck the planet’s atmosphere.
New climatological simulations show 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs — relatively small warheads, compared to the arsenals military superpowers stow today — detonated by neighboring countries would destroy more than a quarter of the Earth’s ozone layer in about two years.
Regions closer to the poles would see even more precipitous drops in the protective gas, which absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. New York and Sydney, for example, would see declines rivaling the perpetual hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. And it may take more than six years for the ozone layer to reach half of its former levels.
Researchers described the results during a panel Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, calling it “a real bummer” that such a localized nuclear war could bring the modern world to its knees.
“This is tremendously dangerous,” said environmental scientist Alan Robock of Rutgers University, one of the climate scientists presenting at the meeting. “The climate change would be unprecedented in human history, and you can imagine the world … would just shut down.”
To defuse the complexity involved in a nuclear climate catastrophe, Wired.com sat down with Michael Mills, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who led some of the latest simulation efforts....
Scientist Kris Helgen holds an Eastern long-beaked echidna in Indonesia's Foja Mountains (map) in a file picture. The elusive egg-laying species is one of the rarest and most genetically unique mammals on the planet, according to the Zoological Society of London's 2010 EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct, Globally Endangered) list, released November 19. (Take an endangered-animals quiz.)
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