Happy Earth Day! Yet, shouldn’t every day be Earth Day? We should take each day to celebrate and appreciate what Earth has given us! As you take time out to find new ways of reducing your carbon footprint by practicing the 3 “R”s (reduce, reuse, recycle), please remember it is the collective small changes that lead to a healthier and more cleaner environment! No need to go and plant a forest (unless you can afford to) by yourself! Find something in your household that can be changed out to save energy or replace chemical cleaners with eco-friendly products or perhaps make a plan to eating sustainably and supporting your local farmers. Whatever you decide to do I hope you have fun showing your gratitude, become healthier, and find a way of given thanks back to this beautiful planet!
In celebration of Earth Day, I wanted to share this message from word artist Prince Ea to help motivate and encourage our youth to take immediate change to safeguarding forests through the Stand for Trees campaign.
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This Earth Day, activist and spoken word artist Prince Ea launched his newest online video entitled “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” to motivate young citizens to take immediate action to stop climate change by protecting threatened forests through the Stand for Trees campaign.
Last month, Prince Ea traveled to Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to witness firsthand the horrors of tropical deforestation. He also visited pioneering forest conservation projects developed by Wildlife Works that demonstrate a successful new way to stop deforestation by rewarding forest communities who conserve their forests.
The Wildlife Works projects that Prince Ea visited in Kenya and the DRC represent two of twelve forest conservation projects participating in the new Stand for Trees campaign, an online initiative created by environmental NGO Code REDD that enables the general public to take direct action to combat climate change through crowd-funding the protection of threatened forests.
“Climate change is an emergency situation of the highest degree and all of us share the responsibility to do something about it,” said Prince Ea.
Climate scientists have warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 17 billion tonnes annually by 2020 to avoid increasing disastrous effects of climate change. The destruction of forests currently contributes more than 7 billion tonnes of emissions.
“I made this video to inform my generation that there is something we can do right now to take back our future; that is to take a Stand for Trees,” said Prince Ea
Local chiefs and thousands of community members enthusiastically welcomed Prince Ea to the Congo Basin Forest, which made national news in the DRC.
“The Stand for Trees campaign was designed to put the power to save forests in the hands of the people to whom the future matters most: young people,” explained Mike Korchinsky, founder of Code REDD and founder and president of Wildlife Works.
Prince Ea’s “Dear Future Generations: Sorry”debuted on April 20th via social media and garnered 25 million views on Facebook in the first 36 hours of its release. To learn more and view the video please visit StandforTrees.org.
About Prince Ea
Activist, spoken word artist and viral sensation with millions of fans, Prince Ea’s thought-provoking pieces deliver important social messages with wit, passion, and hard-hitting punch lines to inspire positive change.
In late 2009, Prince Ea, upset at the present state of the music industry, decided to form a movement named “Make ‘SMART’ Cool,” where SMART is short for Sophisticating Minds And Revolutionizing Thought. The movement attempts to promote intelligence to everyone, everywhere and integrate it with hip-hop without discrimination or preference.
Along with Prince Ea’s internet success, he has also been featured in both national and local publications including Huffington Post, CBS, FOX, Yahoo Music, VIBE Magazine and DISCOVER Magazine. His spoken word pieces have been featured nationwide in various publications and talk shows including the Queen Latifah Show and the Blaze with Glenn Beck. His alias, Prince Ea, is derived from Sumerian mythology, “The Prince of the Earth.”
About Wildlife Works
Wildlife Works protects threatened forests, including the wildlife that inhabits them by providing forest communities with a transformative sustainable development path.
Since 1997, the company has worked with communities in developing countries to help them manage their transition away from forest destruction towards sustainable economic development utilizing job creation as a core conservation strategy.
In 2010, Wildlife Works delivered the world’s first REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) VERs (Verified Emission Reductions) from its pioneering REDD+ project in Kenya.
REDD+ places a value on standing forests as a key element in mitigating climate change and sells that value to progressive corporate leaders who are committed to reducing the carbon footprint of their organizations on a voluntary basis. Wildlife Works protects 1.24 million acres of forest in Kenya and the DRC mitigating approximately 7 million tons of carbon emissions annually.
About Stand for Trees
Stand for Trees is a first of its kind consumer campaign that uses the power of social media and crowd-funding to enable everyone to take real and effective action to reduce deforestation and curb climate change. Through an innovative mobile web solution, individuals can now purchase ‘Stand For Trees Certificates’ – high quality, REDD+ verified carbon credits – to help communities protect endangered forests and wildlife by supporting sustainable livelihoods. The campaign was founded by Code REDD.
