Become a climate activist on Earth Day

Posted by jamie — 21 April 2009 at 12:55pm - Comments

Tomorrow is Earth Day, although over on the international dateline in the Pacific it's already Wednesday 22 April so we're launching our new video now. It's called Inspiring Action and hopefully that's just what it will do - we want to turn 3 million people into climate activists, starting with you.

Join us now, and become a climate activist.  

When we took our first action in 1971, we were a rag-tag group of hippies sailing against a US nuclear weapons test.  We were sailing into impossible odds, with an impossible demand.  But the individuals who set off on that voyage inspired an impossible number of people to achieve impossible things.

We've had three decades of experience in making the impossible happen - an end to nuclear testing, protection of Antarctica from oil and gas exploration, a moratorium on commercial whaling, a ban on ocean dumping and a ban on trade in toxic waste, to name only a few.  We've not only made those changes happen, we made them look inevitable.

Scientists are sounding more and more alarms about the fate of the ice caps, the acidification of our oceans, the loss of our equatorial rainforests and the consequences all these things will have on low-lying countries, on our health, on our ways of raising food, and the foundations of our civilization. There are ample reasons for despair.

But many years ago, one of our activists bagged a quote from another famous activist, and summed up the Greenpeace ethos: "The optimism of the action is better than the the pessimism of the thought."

If you agree, we want you, and 2,999,999 people like you to sign up as climate activists.

When the UN Climate summit convenes in Copenhagen this December, delegates there will be deciding the fate of the Earth. It's looking more and more likely they will bring us a lot of hot air, not a cooler planet.

It's time to get involved. It's time to get your friends involved. It's time to get your parents or your kids involved. Our first mission is to get the message out that we want our leaders to take personal responsibility for stopping climate change.

This Earth Day, please join us and inspire others to action. Please send this video to your friends. Inspire your friends on Facebook. Inspire your followers on Twitter. Post it to your blog.

About Jamie

I'm a forests campaigner working mainly on Indonesia. My personal mumblings can be found @shrinkydinky.

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