conservation
Charity Water Birthdays – Donation Gifts
Charity Water has come up with a concept I love, donations for your birthday! A pretty simple concept, but Charity Water allows you to create your own custom birthday donation page with goals to share with friends called the Birthday Donation Project. Wonderful!
What is this Charity Water you may be asking? Their mission is to bring clean water to the world, particularly developing countries where they need it the most. This can mean anything from drilling wells to water treatment.
90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are in children under five years old.
-World Health Organization
World Water Day – Whole World Water
This past Friday was World Water Day, and I was lucky to attend Whole World Water’s launch party in San Francisco. A perfect venue to showcase an innovative new way to look at bottled water in a ‘green’ way.
Whole World Water‘s premise is simple. Provide high quality onsite filtered water in reusable glass bottles to those who would otherwise choose bottled water. The target market for this product is primarily hotels, restaurants, and the hospitality and tourism industry, but could really be expanded to any number of businesses who normally provide bottled water.
Today nearly 1 billion people don’t have access to clean and safe water. WHOLE WORLD Water is a Campaign designed to unite the Hospitality and Tourism Industry on a non-competitive platform to eradicate this issue.
Water Saving Shower Heads by Oxygenics
I am sure everyone has been frustrated with water saving shower heads at one time or another. You know, the ones you struggle just to get wet under, or just feel like a mist, leaving you longing for the full stream water wasters that your drain couldn’t keep up with. Luckily those days are over and good engineering has resulted in some great water saving shower heads that feel like a downpour.
Now to those who are still using traditional shower heads, you are really leaving a lot of money on the table for a very minimal experience difference. We aren’t just talking about the cost of wasting water, the real expense can also come from the cost of heating all that extra water. Just replacing one shower head can save you more than $70 per year in water and heating costs alone!
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African Rainforest Conservancy Benefit – 2012 Artists for Africa
I am very excited to be covering the African Rainforest Conservancy’s 21st annual Artists for Africa Benefit in a few weeks for The Chic Ecologist. Honoring Kris and Doug Tompkins and in support of the conservation of Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains and Coastal Forests, this year’s benefit will also feature the naming of a newly discovered frog.
This frog, discovered in the Nguru South and Nguu North Mountains of the Eastern Arc rainforest of Tanzania, changes color from a milky white during the daytime to yellow with brown spots during the nighttime.
| What: | African Rainforest Conservancy Benefit – Artists for Africa |
| Where: | Prince George Ballroom – 15 East 27th St, New York |
| When: | Wednesday, April 11th – Cocktails begin @ 6 p.m. |
| Cost: | Cocktails $125, Dinner $500 – event tickets available here |
Additional event highlights will include silent and live art auctions showcasing the works of over forty celebrated artists—including William Abranowicz, Chris Dei, Gerald Forster, Chris Jordan, Carlo Mari, Arthur Meyerson, Jonnie Miles, Joseph Peter, Mirella Ricciardi, and Spencer Tunick—many of whom have graciously supported ARC over the years and will also be in attendance. Providing the ambiance for the evening is a choral performance by the New York City Master Chorale.
Raising over $1 million over the past two decades, this annual event supports ARC’s mission of promoting the conservation of Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains and Coastal Forests by empowering local communities to become the guardians of their forests. Event proceeds will provide core support for ARC’s grassroot conservation and community development programs in 146 villages throughout the mountain ranges and coastal forests of East Africa—among the oldest and most biodiverse in the world. › Continue reading
Water Awareness – World Water Day, March 22nd
The folks over at The Nature Conservancy have a great dialogue going on right now promoting the awareness of water usage through their 20 Days of H20 Campaign. You can tweet or re-tweet your favorite ways to save water, or learn new ones through the tips they add each day up until the 22nd of March.
Curious how much water you use? Check out their infographic (above) on many of the ‘hidden’ water usages such as food and energy production, clothing and more… you may be surprised at what you find. › Continue reading
Great White Shark on Display at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
As of August 31st, 2011, the sixth live great white shark to ever go on display made it’s debut in the Open Sea tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.
This is one of the things that makes the Monterey Bay Aquarium great in my opinion, sharing this beautiful creature with the world, alive and magnificent. I visited the second great white they ever displayed, and it was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I had seen sharks in aquariums, reef sharks while SCUBA diving, in documentary films, and of course Shark Week, but this was unlike any shark I had ever seen.
The beauty and grace of a great white shark (even one this small) can be seen on TV, but encountering it in person is a completely different experience (even if it is only in a tank). Being that close and in person gave me a sense of awe an appreciation like nothing else, only if I had been swimming alongside it would I have felt deeper. Exactly the response conservationists at the aquarium are hoping for in placing this shark on display. › Continue reading
New US Map for Wildlife Conservation
A great new technological step for wildlife conservation efforts comes in the form of a map. The Gap Analysis Program (GAP), which is itself a program under the umbrella of the US Geological Survey, makes it’s mission to “keep common species common.” Essentially, the objective of the program is to maintain that species not (yet) threatened by extinction don’t end up reaching an endangered species list, an issue often deprived of much-needed attention in light of it’s preventative nature. It takes a different track to keep policy makers (and anyone for that matter) informed than traditional conservation efforts which generally maintain species-by-species data, by instead maintaining information about regions and landscapes (which in turn allow those who will want to manipulate them a better idea of what they’d be doing).
A Level 3 Image of Washington State using the GAP Viewer
These efforts recently culminated in a national land cover viewer (and accompanying data set) that combines several important relevant data-sets into one easily accessible package. To be more particular, it combines the following:
- The Southwest Regional Gap Analysis project (2004)
- The Southeast Regional Gap Analysis Project (2007)
- The Northwest Regional Gap project
- The updated California Gap project (2009)
- The Landfire Project (for all remaining regions)
The Green Card
If you are a coffee lover like me, receiving or giving a coffee gift card will put an instant smile on your face. With the new Conservation International Starbucks Gift Card, you get a little something more to smile about. From March 9th to December 31st, 2010, every time the CI card is used, Starbucks will donate five cents to Conservation International in order to help with their efforts to decrease deforestation and continue to find solutions to climate change. Starbucks Coffee has teamed up with Conservation International for more than 10 years in order to improve ethical sourcing of coffee and fight the global climate change that threatens the growth of coffee beans.
Peter Seligmann, Chairman and CEO of CI states that “the alliance between Starbucks and Conservation International is an important step in reducing emissions from deforestation, which accounts for 20 percent of all the carbon released into the atmosphere – double the world’s cars, trucks, and trains combined. Our partnership engages one of the great corporations, their customers and coffee farmers in this battle against climate change. By stepping up this partnership we have aligned our existing work and success to address the most pressing issue of our time.” For details about › Continue reading
