Six on Earth Day: This Earth Day, consider the paradoxical and powerful creature called homo sapiens; Bill McKibben: This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipeline; Climate Change Lesson Plans & Resources; The Hearings That Launched the First Earth Day; Nat
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And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
Thanks John and Gary
Because our evolution is that we are part of the animal world. We are an animal. We are classified as an animal, and we're descended from apes and from everything else on that evolutionary trajectory that comes before the apes.
And so we're very biological, but with this shift in our behavior and our thought processes of what we sometimes refer to as behavioral modernity or the cognitive revolution — with that, we evolve new minds and new ways of thinking and new ways of interacting with each other. And in doing so, we set in motion a process which extracts ourselves from nature.
We create gods and we assemble human exceptionalism and we say that we’re specially created. And then Copernicus comes along and says, the Earth is not the center of the universe, and the sun is not the center of the universe comes not long after that.
And Darwin my intellectual hero comes along and says, well, actually we're just another animal. This isn't to be to be misanthropic. I think we're amazing. I mean, I'm a sort of humanist with a small “h.” But at the same time, we're so anthropocentric that we think of ourselves as special when we're not, and miss things that are special about us that we should be really focused on."
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We’re cooked unless investors stop funding fossil fuel companies.
"Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)
Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve likely heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “one great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America’s cities then."
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Want to see animal art in the wild? Check out how other families are celebrating Earth Day and the Nat Geo Neighborhood Safari. #NatGeoEarthDayatHome
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