A big thank you to all of you who decided to take action last week during the fourth annual World Rainforest Week.
Over 2,000 of you pledged to take action during the 7 day effort to highlight rainforest destruction all over the world. 1,162 of you lived tree-free on Tuesday, while 1,053 of you supported the Amazon in some way on Wednesday. Almost a thousand people helped make the connections between dirty energy funded by banks like Wells Fargo and global warming and the impacts of those actions on our world’s remaining rainforests. The real question we are asking banks who continually invest billions in environmentally unsustainable projects is, are you really investing in our common future? We don’t think they are.
Over 800 of you took the rainforests to your classrooms! We wanted to help connect teachers in the Rainforest Heroes Teachers Lounge that is open to anyone working in education today.
Working to get oil out of our lives over 900 of you decided to have to an oil-free day be it through the Craigslist rideshare program, riding bikes to work/school, sending a message to Ford Motor Company to get serious about gas-guzzlers or claiming their Freedom From Oil.
On the final day of World Rainforest Week we asked people to host parties. If you hosted one, tell us about it! You can post pics to our Flickr account online (tag them with “WRW”) or just send them to activism [at] ran [dot] org. Over 750 of you hosted a Party for the Planet to help raise awareness about rainforest related issues like global warming, dirty energy and oil addiction. We hope we’ll hear some news about these parties and that you post your pics to the Flickr account or send them in to us to post to the community!
Now’s your chance to share with everyone what YOU did for WRW. Post a comment telling us how you chose to celebrate the week!
Twitter Updates
On Saturday evening the Jade Thermatics Center here in Prescott, Arizona sponsored a showing of the movie “BLUE BUTTERFLY” with popcorn and tropical punch…Everyone loved it!
Sunday afternoon a small group gathered at Granite Creek Park for a potluck, music making and prayers for the rain forest. These are the first seeds planted here that I am aware of…The energy of the rain forest with its colors and bamboo showed up here in the mountains of Arizona…
Thank you for your wonderful post. It’s great to know some people are willing to embrace earth friendly practices!
Just a note of caution – CRAIGSLIST is just about the WORST way to rideshare possible. I’ve heard some pretty scary nightmare stories of girls who have been solicited half-way through their trip or about hippies that light up a joint while behind the wheel. I think a large part of the issue with services like CRAIGSLIST is that they are free, so their is no barrier to scum, there’s no filter.
Beyond the potential dangers, there’s really no way to easily find people going to the same place at the same time. Plus, even if you do find someone going your way, you have to ask MANY questions to truly be comfortable. Are you dealing with a smoker or non-smoker, male or female, hill-billy or rap artist. Without laundry list of questions, you’re setting yourself up for hours of awkwardness on the road.
Fortunately, there is a great Craigslist rideshare alternatives The service, Ridester.com offers free registration, and it’s free to list an offer or look for a ride. The ridester system offers a feedback rating system to create accountability and reduce flakiness. It also includes a profile with personality-revealing avatars and personal preferences such as gender, smoking & not-smoking, and even music preferences. Once a rider and driver find and approve each other, the rider pays the driver’s asking price, less a reasonable processing fee. How small is this fee? Let’s say a driver’s asking price is $25. The rider 2would pay just $27. Pretty reasonable cost to the rider, considering the advantages.
There’s a bunch of good rideshare websites, including GishiGo. Easy as pie and doesn’t have “rules” nor “login/membership”. Just use it and GO. Great network design.
Check it out: http://www.GishiGo.com
GishiGo is based on PayPal. Does a good job at filtering out all the BS that’s so very common on free anonymous websites like Craigslist and MySpace, etc. People refuse to put up the 99 cents if they are “just BS kidding” (like half the time on some websites), and they refuse to do any identification/papertrail if they are pervs. Seems there are a lot of weird ones on the “anonymous and socially open & politically active” Craigslist (that site is great since it has the eyeballs = the traffic). GishiGo seems to be good tool to use side-by-side with it!