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Earth Day 2013 – Share Your Photos

Posted by RZ on Apr 21, 2013

Earth Day 2013: The Face of Climate Change

Climate change has many faces.

A man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise, a farmer in Kansas struggling to make ends meet as prolonged drought ravages the crops, a fisherman on the Niger River whose nets often come up empty, a child in New Jersey who lost her home to a super-storm, a woman in Bangladesh who can’t get fresh water due to more frequent flooding and cyclones…

And they’re not only human faces.

They’re the polar bear in the melting arctic, the tiger in India’s threatened mangrove forests, the right whale in plankton-poor parts of the warming North Atlantic, the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by more frequent bushfires and droughts…

These faces of climate change are multiplying every day.

For many, climate change can often seem remote and hazy – a vague and complex problem far off in the distance that our grandchildren may have to solve. But that’s only because they’re still fortunate enough to be insulated from its mounting consequences. Climate change has very real effects on people, animals, and the ecosystems and natural resources on which we all depend. Left unchecked, they’ll spread like wildfire.

Luckily, other faces of climate change are also multiplying every day.

Every person who does his or her part to fix the problem is also a Face of Climate Change: the entrepreneurs who see opportunity in creating the new green economy, the activists who organize community action and awareness campaigns, the engineers who design the clean technology of the future, the public servants who fight for climate change laws and for mitigation efforts, the ordinary people who commit to living sustainably…

Between now and Earth Day, we’ll collect and display images of people, animals, and places directly affected or threatened by climate change – as well as images of people stepping up to do something about it. We’ll tell the world their stories.

But we need your help. We need you to be climate reporters. So, send us your pictures and stories that show The Face of Climate Change.

On and around Earth Day, an interactive digital display of all the images will be shown at thousands of events around the world, including next to federal government buildings in countries that produce the most carbon pollution. The display will also be made available online to anyone who wants to view or show it. Together, we’ll highlight the solutions and showcase the collective power of individuals taking action across the world. In doing so, we hope to inspire our leaders to act and inspire ourselves to redouble our efforts in the fight against climate change.

http://www.earthday.org/2013/about.html

The Girl With No Name

Posted by RZ on Apr 11, 2013

Marina Chapman is a British housewife living in Bradford in Yorkshire and is married to a church organist. This doesn’t sound  particularly unusual but her life story is anything but normal.

Chapman says that she was kidnapped in Columbia at the age of 5, presumably for ransom and later abandoned in a remote village and left for dead in the middle of the jungle.

She was adopted by a troupe of Capuchin monkeys who fed her and helped her to adjust to their lifestyle. She spotted the monkeys in the jungle and started eating their discarded fruit and nuts, eventually forgetting her parents and even her own name.

She spent about five years with the monkeys before being found by hunters and sold into human slavery to a brothel in Cucuta in exchange for a parrot

Her feral instincts helped her to escape from this and live as a street kid, before being adopted by a loving family in Bogota as a teenager and giving herself the name of Marina.

View the Book – UK
The Girl with No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

View the Book – USA
The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

Andrew Lounie, the book’s agent says:

“She was confronted by about twenty curious capuchin monkeys,”
By following them and copying what they ate and drank, their social activities, their language, Marina gradually became part of the family for five extraordinary years. They fought, played and shared tender and terrifying experiences. Marina developed extraordinary super-human abilities such as tree-climbing, stealth and animal communication.”

Once while living with the monkeys, she ate too many of a certain type of berry and became very ill with stomach cramps and nausea. She thought one of the monkeys was trying to kill her because it took her down to the river and kept pushing her head into the water.

She says she looked into the eyes of the monkey and knew it wasn’t a bad monkey. She then started drinking the water which helped her to vomit out the poison and flush out her system.

She made a trip to Britain in her mid-twenties with a family that employed her and while in Britain, met her husband John at a church in Bradford. They married and have two children.

“When we wanted food, we’d have to make noises for it,” her daughter said “All my school friends loved Mum as she was so unusual. She was childlike, too, in many ways.

Her daughters said the story made sense “When you are raised by her, you just find it normal.’

The daughters considered giving their mother a lie detector test, but instead they went to Colombia to try to verify her story. They say they tracked down locations and found people whom they claim corroborated their mother’s story outside the jungle.

“Mom seemed more excited about finding her monkey family,’’ Joanna Chapman explained. “She’s learned recently that monkeys can live up to 55 years, and she’s recently gone, ‘They might be alive, I might find the one.’”

“There’s no evidence she’s lying,’ according to Douglas Candland, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University specializing in feral children “What happens over time is of course the more you tell the story, some aspects of it get sharper, and some get forgotten.”

The Girl With No Name has been serialised in theMail on Sunday and The Sun. Numerous other papers and broadcasters have picked up on it including BBC Breakfast TV (10 April), Victoria Derbyshire, Radio 5 (10 April), Newsround, CBBC(10 April), This Morning, ITV (11 April), Saturday Live, Radio 4 (13 April) and first press interview The Guardian Weekend (13 April)

Jubilee Woods: The Last Tree Planted Today

Posted by RZ on Mar 27, 2013

Jubilee Woods: 6 Million New Trees – thanks to all those who helped plant them.
Today The Princess Royal planted the last of the 6 million trees
that the Woodland Trust set as its target for the Jubilee Woods Project.
The Princess Royal is the patron of the Jubilee Woods Project.

Last February, the Queen planted twin symbolic oaks at Sandringham, to launch the Jubilee Woods Project which was organised by the Woodland Trust to coincide with the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

6 Million trees have been planted for the project, to create 12,000 acres of new woodland – an area three times the size of all London’s Royal Parks.

400 Jubilee Woods of more than an acre in size were created, and 3,500 communities and 40,000 schools were given free packs of trees, including Royal Oak Saplings.

Millions of people, including the Queen and members of the Royal Family took part in the project, generously donating time and money.

The amount of support from the public is a reflection of their concern for the environment – and their love for trees, a sentiment passionately displayed a year earlier when immense public protest stopped the government’s attempts to sell off the national forests to private developers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/28/england-forest-sell-off-q-and-a

Judi Dench plants a tree for the Woodland Trust’s Jubilee Woods project

Humanity Photo Awards 2013

Posted by RZ on Mar 11, 2013

An opportunity to make your photography part of an important world heritage documentation collection.

Deadline: 15th April 2013

The project is run by the China Folklore Photographic Association and is supported by UNESCO

There are prizes to be won including visits to China for the award ceremony.

Their collection includes a diverse and fascinating selection of images from around the world.

GUIDELINES OF HUMANITY PHOTO AWARDS 2013

 Mission
We call upon responsible photographers who respect life and love to take their cameras, in the form of special photo series：

•   To explore and rescue the endangered folk cultures of worldwide nationalities by means of photography;
•  To profoundly record the changes and evolution of various folk cultures in a genuine and vivid form;
•   To record, spread and share the multicultural achievements of the world to enhance mutual understanding and exchanges of human beings and to promote the world peace and development;
•   To contribute to the World Folklore Photo Museum with world culture records.

 Organized by
THE CHINA FOLKLORE PHOTOGRAPHIC ASSOCIATION (CFPA)
THE UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION (UNESCO)

 On-line Submission
Photos can only be submitted on-line.

 Entrants must register on the website  http://www.hpa.org.cn  and submit photos in accordance with relevant requirements.

Every entrant could choose any category listed on the website and is allowed to submit no more than 3 sets. Every set entered should contain 8 to 14 photos.

Personal information as well as the photos could be modified or replaced (registered e-mail excepted) during the photo collection period.

Schedule
Photo Collection Period: September 16th, 2012—April 15th, 2013 (BeijingTime)

Selection: By mid August, 2013, the photos granted with the Performance Awards, the Nomination Awards and the Documentary Awards will be announced after two rounds of evaluation. On September 14th and 15th, 2013, the final evaluation unveils the Grand Awards of the six categories. The results will be published in stages on the above mentioned website.

Award Ceremony: September 16th, 2013. Humanity Photo Grand Awards and Jury’s Special Awards will be announced on the Award Ceremony.

Premiere Exhibition: The premiere exhibition of the HPA 2013 –Memories of Mankind Ⅷ, which consists all the wining works with the Nomination Awards and the higher ones, will be held in the same period with the final selection and the award ceremony in the same city.

 Categories
The following categories could be selected as the theme of the photos:

Portrait & Costume
Portraits of people from different nationalities; costumes and adornments featuring diverse ethnic cultures, including everyday dress, ceremonial dress, hats and shoes, adornments and hairstyle, etc; the manufacture of costumes and adornments; distinctive attire customs such as dressing etiquette and taboos and so on.

 Architecture
Traditional dwellings, public facilities, the construction process of distinctive architecture (e.g. religious buildings) , structure, interior layout and furniture adornments of all kinds; the influence of the surroundings reflected on features of the local architecture; dwelling habits of different ethnic groups.

 Living and Production Custom
The traditional ways of production and life, including everyday work, such as fishing, hunting, farming, forestry, animal husbandry, handicrafts industry, etc; business trade and transportation; living habits and ways of dieting as well as food making; comprehensive life customs in series, of a specific region, of a nationality or a tribe.

 Festivities
Annual and seasonal festivals; festivals on production and recreation, religious ceremonies, temple fairs and other traditional folk activities

 Education, Recreation, Sports & Technology
Education, traditional ecology, folk science and technology, folk medicine and sanitation, folk crafts, traditional sports and recreational activities, and local dramas, etc.

 Traditional Rites
Birth, adult rite, wedding, funeral, taboo, worship, morality, respect for the old people, traditional etiquette, and traditional ceremony for individual, family, village or ethnic group, and religious rites.

 Awards
Humanity Photo Grand Awards: 6 (one for each category)

 Judging Criteria: The final prized photos will be selected according to a comprehensive evaluation of their photographic technique, documentary value and the difficulty in photographing and can best reveal the mission of the HPA contest.

 Prizes: a prize of US$2000; an award certificate; a book/CD-photo collection of the HPA 2013; an invitation to attend the award ceremony and the opening ceremony of the premiere exhibition of “Memories of Mankind Ⅷ”; transportation fee and a 3-9 days hotel accommodation; to put prized photos on the premiere exhibition.

 Humanity Photo Documentary Awards: 60

Prizes: an award certificate; a book/CD-photo collection of the HPA 2013; an invitation to attend the award ceremony and the opening ceremony of the premiere exhibition of“Memories of Mankind Ⅷ”; transportation fee and a 3-9 days hotel accommodation; to put prized photos on the premiere exhibition.

 In addition, photographs of Humanity Photo Documentary Awards will have the opportunities to win Jury’s Special Awards according to the photographer’s story-telling, interview and editing techniques. Each winner will receive photographic equipment or product which is equivalent to US$500.

Humanity Photo Nomination Awards: 100

Prizes: an award certificate; a book/CD-photo collection of the HPA 2013; an invitation to attend the award ceremony and the opening ceremony of the premiere exhibition of“Memories of Mankind Ⅷ”; a 3-9 days hotel accommodation; to put prized photos on the premiere exhibition.

 Humanity Photo Performance Awards: 500

Prizes: an electronic award certificate; name of winners and his works listed in the book/CD; An invitation to attend the award ceremony and the opening ceremony of the premiere exhibition of “Memories of Mankind Ⅷ”;Travel and accommodation expense will be at his/her own. Winners arrange their own visa formalities for participating the Award Ceremony, the organizer will help them accordingly, but will not be responsible for any problems related to visa.

Every participant except the winners for the aforementioned awards will:

• Get the electronic copy of a Commemoration Certificate of the HPA 2013 officially stamped by the two organizers — the CFPA and the UNESCO.
• Get a discount price to purchase the photo album of HPA 2013.
•  Be invited to attend the Awards Ceremony and the Premiere Exhibition.
• Those who attend the ceremony could get the hard copy of the Commemoration Certificate together with the photo album of HPA 2013. All the travel expenses should be born by the participants.

 Participant is responsible for applying for the visa on his/her own, the CFPA could offer help, but will not be responsible for any caused problems.

Entry Rules (Please read carefully.)

Entrants

 1.  Please register on the website http://www.hpa.org.cn, and all photos should be submitted on-line.

 2.  There are no restrictions on entrants in terms of profession, gender, age, nationality, country and region.

 3.  The photos must be taken by the entrant himself/ herself, otherwise the entrant will be deprived of the right to win the prizes in the contest.

 4.  Photos entered jointly by two or more than two participants will not be accepted.

 5.  Please use only Chinese or English to fill in Entry Form. The entrant’s name in Entry Form should be in accordance with that in his/her valid identity certificate.

 6.  The enrollment of this contest will be regarded as the acceptance of the Guidelines of the HPA 2013. Any legal responsibility relating to photos, such as copyright, right of reputation and portrait, right of privacy, right of trade mark, etc. will be borne by the entrants.

 7.  The contest is open to everyone except the members of the jury and staff of HPA 2013 Organizing Committee.

 Candidate Photos

8.  Photos that have won prizes in previous HPA contests are excluded from the HPA 2013, and other works are free to enter.

9.  There are no restrictions on countries or nationalities which are shown in the photos. (Entries can contain several ethnic groups in one country or one nationality living in different countries.)

10. There is no time limit as to when the photos were taken. They can be taken on one occasion or over a period of time.

11.  The category of the photos submitted should be specified. The Organizer and judges are not responsible to re-categorize any photo.

12.  Stories/Portfolios should consist of a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 14 photos. Each entrant is allowed to submitted no more than 3 sets.

13.  Photos must be uploaded with .jpg format, size between 1MB and 5MB.

14.   Only the necessary retouching which does not alter the original appearance of the photo is allowed. All photos are prohibited from synthesis, addition, deletion and greatly color changes. Photos with added borders, backgrounds or other kind of mounting will not be accepted. To keep the records’ authenticity, composite, splicing and tricky photos will not be judged.

15.  Each photo should contain caption that truly depicts the content of the photos.

 Declaration of the Organizer

16.  No entry fee for this contest.

17.  To guarantee the fairness of the HPA 2013, personal information should not be shown on any place of the photo nor the caption text, otherwise the photo will not be judged.

18.  With the guarantee of the right of signature for every author, the Organizer has the right to repeatedly use the photos which are submitted for HPA 2013 in related non-commercial activities, including publications, exhibitions, TV programs, internet, electronic media, etc. and without remuneration to the authors. The Organizer reserves the right to do probable editing of the photos.

19.  Photos must be submitted before April 15th, 2013 at the website above-mentioned. (The date when the photos are completely submitted is deemed as the arrival date.)

20.  CFPA reserves the right of final interpretation of the Guidelines of HPA 2013.

 Contact Information

CHINA FOLKLORE PHOTOGRAPHIC ASSOCIATION (CFPA)

Address: Room 315,
NorthBuilding,
No.1 Liupukang Street,
Xicheng District,
Beijing100120,
China.

Tel.: +86 10 62252175
Fax: +86 10 62252175

 E-mail: mail@hpa.org.cn

http://www.hpa.org.cn

One Billion Rising: Join V-Day on Valentines Day 2013

Posted by RZ on Jan 23, 2013

What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.

One In Three Women On The Planet Will Be Raped Or Beaten In Her Lifetime.

One Billion Women Violated Is An Atrocity.

One Billion Women Dancing Is A Revolution.

Join V-Day on
02.14.13

STRIKE, DANCE, RISE
in your community &
Demand an
end to violence

ABOUT ONE BILLION RISING

On V-Day’s 15th Anniversary, 14 February 2013, we are inviting ONE BILLION women and those who love them to WALK OUT, DANCE, RISE UP, and DEMAND an end to this violence. ONE BILLION RISING will move the earth, activating women and men across every country. V-Day wants the world to see our collective strength, our numbers, our solidarity across borders.

What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.

ONE BILLION RISING IS:

A global strike
An invitation to dance
A call to men and women to refuse to participate in the status quo until rape and rape culture ends
An act of solidarity, demonstrating to women the commonality of their struggles and their power in numbers
A refusal to accept violence against women and girls as a given
A new time and a new way of being

START A RISING 
OR FIND ONE NEAR YOU TO JOIN 

Over It

By Eve Ensler

I am over rape.

I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.

I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.

I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.

I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don’t have a sense of humor, and women don’t have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really fucking funny. We just don’t think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot.

I am over how long it seems to take anyone to ever respond to rape.

I am over Facebook taking weeks to take down rape pages.

I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.

I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.

I am over rape happening in broad daylight.

I am over the 207 clinics in Ecuador supported by the government that are capturing, raping, and torturing lesbians to make them straight.

I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called “comrades.”

I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to have an abortion.

I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.

And I’m over CNBC debate host Maria Bartiromo getting booed when she asked him about it. She was booed, not Herman Cain.

Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.

I am over rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.

I am over starving Somali women being raped at the Dadaab in Kenya, and I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.

I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it’s their fault or they did something to make it happen.

I am over violence against women not being a #1 international priority when one out of three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime – the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.

No women, no future, duh.

I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what and who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.

I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters – film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes – while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.

I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?

You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

I am over years and years of being over rape.

And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5 years old.

And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape.

And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.

I am over being polite about rape. It’s been too long now, we have been too understanding.

We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine – once and for all – what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need you to let our rage and our compassion connect us together so we can change the paradigm of global rape.

There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.

ONE BILLION WOMEN.

The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.

Today it begins, moving toward 14 February 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.

Because we are over it.

Read Eve Ensler’s open letter to Todd Akin in The Huffington Post 

“Mr. Akin, your words have kept me awake.

As a rape survivor, I am reeling from your recent statement where you said you misspoke when you said that women do not get pregnant from legitimate rape, and that you were speaking “off the cuff.”

Clarification. You didn’t make some glib throw away remark. You made a very specific ignorant statement clearly indicating you have no awareness of what it means to be raped. And not a casual statement, but one made with the intention of legislating the experience of women who have been raped. Perhaps more terrifying: it was a window into the psyche of the GOP.

You used the expression “legitimate” rape as if to imply there were such a thing as “illegitimate” rape. Let me try to explain to you what that does to the minds, hearts and souls of the millions of women on this planet who experience rape. It is a form of re-rape. The underlying assumption of your statement is that women and their experiences are not to be trusted. That their understanding of rape must be qualified by some higher, wiser authority. It delegitimizes and undermines and belittles the horror, invasion, desecration they experienced. It makes them feel as alone and powerless as they did at the moment of rape.”

Read more…

Msg from Earth: You’re Amazing

Posted by RZ on Dec 27, 2012

Msg from Earth: You’re Amazing

For All Those Who Stood Up for the Health of the Planet and its Inhabitants

Via its Warriors at Greenpeace:

“You are incredible. Thanks for everything you’ve done in 2012. Let’s do it again in 2013.”