Dr. Maya Angelou may be gone, but her legacy lives on. She has been immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp, and now, her iconic autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is being re-released, complete with a foreword by her “daughter-friend” Oprah Winfrey. The re-release ensures that her vast wisdom will live on, touching millions of lives and countless generations to come.
“I am a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Women, that’s me.”
“One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
“The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
“Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.”
“I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a b—-. You’ve got to go out and kick a–.”
“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies. You may tread me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
“I believe that each of us comes from the creator trailing wisps of glory.”
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
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Introducing Donate a Photo, the free app from Johnson & Johnson that turns your photos into a way to do good. For every photo you share through Donate a Photo, Johnson & Johnson donates $1 to a cause you want to help—which does things like fix up a public park, get medicine for an infant, or help kids play sports safely. Get the app and start helping here: http://www.donateaphoto.com
Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc. will donate $1 for each eligible photo uploaded. Each available cause has its own start and end dates and minimum and maximum donation amounts. See complete details for each cause at http://www.donateaphoto.com. Only the first photo uploaded in any day by an individual will trigger a donation up until the program ends or the maximum contribution amount for the program is reached.
Our aspiration as a company is to care for the world, one person at a time. Our YouTube channel provides you an unprecedented look behind the scenes at Johnson & Johnson, spotlighting the people, stories and causes that inspire us to care.
Syrian Crisis : Charity Navigator: Find out which charities are providing humanitarian aid to the ever-increasing number of Syrians affected by the civil war.
Background
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reports that with over half the population forced out of their homes, the nearly six-year Syrian conflict is the largest displacement crisis in the world. Currently, there are 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian aid. Of those, 4.9 million are trapped in hard-to-reach areas and more than half of those are children. More specifically, the UNOCHA says that 411,000 children are living in besieged locations without adequate access to food, water, or healthcare.
Current Crisis
In the government’s efforts to retake the city of Aleppo, hundreds of people have been killed and tens of thousands more displaced after bombing has left entire neighborhoods in ruins. But there is some hope as efforts to evacuate civilians finally got underway in mid-December 2016.
How to Help
The Syrians impacted by the ongoing, bloody civil war depend upon humanitarian aid for food, clothing and shelter. The highly-rated charities listed here are providing these services and more (such as medical assistance and schooling for children). Be sure to consider what it is that you want your donation to accomplish and to find a charity offering that specific type of aid. To do that, simply click on the charity’s name and view its rating page (where you can learn about its Financial Health, Accountability & Transparency). Once you are satisfied with its rating, then you can go to the charity’s website (we link to each charity’s site from its ratings page) to learn more specifically about the type of assistance the charity is providing in relation to the Syrian crisis.
Learn about the criteria used to create this featured list of charities.
Help reduce CO2 emissions and fight global warming! Plant trees for free by simply clicking on the link. Reduce carbon emissions and fight global warming. http://ecologyfund.com / Plant a tree with a 50 second view of this eco friendly ad. https://youtu.be/5MV0gqN7fbA
When you choose the activity you want to support and click the "Donate" button, Brother will make a donation of one yen (about one cent USD) per click on your behalf. http://www.brotherearth.com/en/top.html https://naturarvet.se/ Click on the icon next to the counter to preserve the forest in Scandanavia
Like Boxed water on social media and when you post a picture of their water with the hashtag they will plant 2 trees for you. https://www.facebook.com/BoxedWater/
Now available in USA and Canada BetterPlanetPaper, with every purchase or referral of toilet paper or toilet roll they plant a tree! Eco Friendly paper for you! https://www.betterplanetpaper.com/
Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every year.
The world’s rain forests could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.
Forests are cut down for many reasons, but most of them are related to money or to people’s need to provide for their families.The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting crops or grazing livestock. Often many small farmers will each clear a few acres to feed their families by cutting down trees and burning them in a process known as “slash and burn” agriculture.
Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also cut countless trees each year. Loggers, some of them acting illegally, also build roads to access more and more remote forests—which leads to further deforestation. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl.
Not all deforestation is intentional. Some is caused by a combination of human and natural factors like wildfires and subsequent overgrazing, which may prevent the growth of young trees.
Deforestation has many negative effects on the environment. The most dramatic impact is a loss of habitat for millions of species. Seventy percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the deforestation that destroys their homes.
Deforestation also drives climate change. Forest soils are moist, but without protection from sun-blocking tree cover they quickly dry out. Trees also help perpetuate the water cycle by returning water vapor back into the atmosphere. Without trees to fill these roles, many former forest lands can quickly become barren deserts.
Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day and holds in heat at night. This disruption leads to more extreme temperatures swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.
Trees also play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. Fewer forests means larger amounts of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere—and increased speed and severity of global warming.
The quickest solution to deforestation would be to simply stop cutting down trees. Though deforestation rates have slowed a bit in recent years, financial realities make this unlikely to occur.
A more workable solution is to carefully manage forest resources by eliminating clear-cutting to make sure that forest environments remain intact. The cutting that does occur should be balanced by the planting of enough young trees to replace the older ones felled in any given forest. The number of new tree plantations is growing each year, but their total still equals a tiny fraction of the Earth’s forested land.
Understanding Ocean Plastics Is Key To Keeping Our Oceans Healthy
Ocean plastic is found in nearly every corner of our seas; from the most remote beaches to the arctic ice. An estimated 4.7 to 12.7 million metric tonnes of plastic enter our oceans annually. If we take the mid-point that’s about 17,637,000,000 pounds of plastic every year, or enough to fill 5 grocery bags for every single foot of coastline in the world. If that alone weren’t bad enough, here’s a snapshot of what that means:
There are an estimated 5.25 TRILLION pieces of plastic in the ocean.
By 2050 we could have more plastic than fish in our oceans.
At least 1 million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals die each year because of plastic pollution.
Toxic chemicals accumulate in ocean plastic (sometimes concentrating at 1 million times higher than the water around it) and end up in our food chain.
The common understanding is that there are huge ‘garbage islands’ floating in the middle of the ocean – but that’s not quite true. These floating garbage patches aren’t always visible from the air — or even from a passing boat — since most of the plastic is floating just beneath the surface, and most of the pieces are smaller than 1 centimeter in diameter. Over time, the plastic bits get broken down into ever smaller pieces as they get battered by waves and degraded by the sun.
So how does all this plastic find it’s way out to the middle of the ocean? As it turns out, about 80 percent of ocean plastic gets there from the land. Most of our plastic garbage does end up in landfills, where it takes thousands of years to degrade. A small fraction gets recycled – in the United States, the rate is only about 9 percent.
However, many developing countries don’t have the infrastructure to deal with solid waste, so plastic is pushed into the ocean-bound waterways rather than collected to be brought to landfills. Plastic leaks from garbage dumps, gets blown out by the wind, flows down storm drains and is carried out to sea by rivers and waterways.
How do we start finding solutions? As it turns out, plastic is very valuable and there’s a real business solution to the ocean plastic problem. Between $80 and $120 billion dollars is lost to the economy each year when we dispose of plastic packaging.
Social Plastic® is sold to impact-driven brands to transfer the value of the plastic into the hands of the people who collect it. By making plastic waste a currency, it becomes too valuable to end up in ocean-bound rivers and waterways.
Keep the beaches clean – We know you’re taking your trash home with you; so why not pick up a few pieces while you’re there?
Reuse and recycle – Try to avoid packaging whenever you can. Carry a reusable water bottle and grocery bag then recycle whatever you can.
Use your buying power to create change - : One of the most effective ways to prevent plastic waste is making sure your purchasing decisions reduce the amount of new plastic being created.
Recycled plastic prevents the need to manufacture new material, but Social Plastic keeps plastic out of the ocean.
Social Plastic is collected in vulnerable coastal communities throughout the world. It creates income for the people who need it most and they make sure that pollution doesn’t end up in the ocean.
Mangrove forests, dancing lessons and rain in the dry season
2016 was an eventful year for various reasons, not all of them pleasant. However, from a tree planting perspective, we had many wonderful stories to share:
We were able to start supporting additional reforestation programs and are now planting trees in Burkina Faso, Madagascar and Peru. We hired Ecosia’s first Tree Planting Officer, who will go to any length to get an expert look at the trees you are helping us plant. We experienced rain in the Sahel desert, were granted the honour to attend a meeting of the local chiefs, watched coffee seedlings be planted by hand in the Amazon rainforest, admired our tree nurseries in Madagascar from a bird’s eye view, took a walk through a Mangrove forest and were taught how to dance properly in Burkina Faso.
If 2016 has helped us understand anything, it is the following: Together, we can make amazing things happen. Thank you for joining us on this journey, dear Ecosians, and have a peaceful 2017.
