Animals

They still love you even if you forget to fill up their water for a minute or two...

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of ones soul remains unawakened."

Anatole France



Getting Involved

I had one of those "life changing" experiences recently. It all started with Ellen. (Seriously though.) On my lunch break at work I was watching her show in the break room and she had Ted Danson on as a guest. Now, I've never been a Cheers fan really, so I zoned out slightly, lucky for me I zoned back in at the perfect moment!! Ted apparently has been an ocean activist for the last 30 years or something and he recently wrote a book called Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do To Save Them. I was intrigued-then he mentioned that he recently went vegan and I was captivated.

I went to Barnes and Nobel that very night to find the book and purchase it.

Best. Investment. Ever. Truly, I've never spent $32.50 more wisely in my entire life.

I had no idea what is going on in our oceans!! That's probably due partially to the fact that I live in Utah. We're not super close to the coast here. This book is fantastic in multiple ways: first, there are pictures all over the place-it's a very reader friendly book, second at the end of the "chapters" there are suggestions of ways that you can help and third, even complex issues (like the molecular breakdown of oil vs water) is put in a way that even a blond girl in her early 20's can understand.

Bravo Ted Danson.

As I was reading I discovered a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times from 2006 by Kenneth Weiss called Altered Oceans. Of course, I had to google them. It turns out that the articles spawned an awesome website which I just happened to have linked to my blog here -----> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-oceans-series,0,7783938.special

As I've been discovering all of this new information and all of these very real problems facing us on a daily basis I began defaulting to signing online petitions to my senators, joining Greenpeace online and studying as much as I could. But I still wasn't feeling very active in making the world a better place.



Dead sea floor.

Now-I did consider up and moving to the coast somewhere so I could hop right on board with ocean conservation agencies-believe me, that was considered. However, with my ripe old age comes knowledge and wisdom and the understanding that an undertaking of that magnitude takes some planning. So instead I signed up to start volunteering at an elementary school in SL this month and to start helping refugee families settle here in Utah next month. I figure at the very least, it's a step in the right direction!
If you do anything because of this blog just go to this website http://act.oceana.org/cms/letter/l-turtles-comprehensiveprotections/ and sign your name. Sea turtles are my favorites.

Here are some other interesting websites if you're interested

http://www.oceana.org/


http://www.savethehighseas.org/


http://www.mcbi.org/shining_sea/s2ss_globe.htm

AROHA

Improve or Enjoy?

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

E. B. White

Sometimes I feel like this. Actually, quite a bit I feel like this. Maybe I should be focusing on finding a way to do both...

Aroha

...

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in a distortions. We patronize them for the incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And  therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; the are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."

 Henry Beston 1928

This is my new dream. I'm adding it to my 30 before 30 list as we speak.

Diving with humpback whales.

Hell yeah.

AROHA