As I watched Greta Thunberg melt down at COP26 in 2021, I thought of all the years that have gone by since the first COP, and how many children have spent their youths getting teargassed instead of skateboarding or speaking to arrogant so-called leaders at COPS and summits instead of working on their tans, or giving interviews to press corps about atrocities against nature instead of about winning volleyball or basketball games on their school teams, or exploring tar sands and ocean waste sites and dying coral reefs instead of taking pleasant strolls through nature. Greta has spent her youth researching, organizing, speaking, nay, begging, pleading, demonstrating, being interviewed, just as Slater Jewell-Kemker, and Severn Cullis-Suzuki and the thousands of children they led, did before her.  Three decades of sacrifice by young people who've entered their teens terrified – with excellent reason! – of the horrors that will likely unfold during their lifetimes.   Three decades of

  Additional Information About Directory Dump Hi Friends, Just a quick note. I've been working on Directory Dump all morning – essentially, it's going to be my research directory, an alphabetized/categorized directory of all the sources and contacts I use to research environmental issues and the people who stand for the earth. The document is already 77 pages long, and that's without all the information I'll be plugging in. Eek.   I think that's going to present problems publishing it on the blog as a single document. My solution is to publish it a category at a time, perhaps every other week instead of monthly. I'll have to see how much I can accomplish in what time frame.  When I know, you'll know.  It's slow and tedious work, but I think the finished product will be worth it. So that's it. Just a little progress update. We'll see what I've got on the 31 st . Whatever I have will go up on the blog.   In the meantime, shine a g

Hi Friends, It's almost the end of the month and I've been researching my butt off, which means two things: lots of articles coming up, and lots of research links and info I've gathered about environmental and wildlife organizations and individuals.   I was thinking recently, about how much I'd like to do, how stretched my heartstrings are, but how my purse strings are ready to snap (not to mention my Broken Old Broad body.).   However, it occurred to me: I'm a writer with WIFI.   Bingo! I have oodles of followers on the one hand and dozens of people and organizations to write about on the other. So, I started my Green Geezers blog and dug in.   You can do the same thing, and you don't even need to start the blog. Just share: ·          Pick a bunch of causes close to your heart: endangered wildlife, ocean pollution, fossil fuel issues, forest depletion, preserves, poaching, over-development of public lands, whatever tugs at your heartstrings. ·        

    So put yourself in a panda's place: you're young, you live in a Chinese forest where temperatures are mostly mild, occasionally a little chilly, there's plenty of bamboo around to keep you happily crunching through about 80 pounds a day, (and you have this cool jutting wrist that's perfectly shaped to hold the stalks), you're coming into adulthood weighing in at around 300 pounds nicely distributed over your four-foot-plus frame making you cuddly and cute to the babes looking your way, and nobody in the forest bothers you because you have the ability to smack 'em down, but you don't because you're content with your bamboo, your babes, and your frequent naps wherever you decide to flop. There's a spring in your step and life is good. Except for all that noise a mile or so over. At first it shocked you and you tucked yourself away deeper into the bamboo forest, still happily munching, and the noise kind of went away at night so there was peace

I highly recommend Thicker Than Water by Erica Cirino, who has combined science and writing to invite us on her journey all over the world to learn about the ocean plastic crisis.  This book is chock full of information, presented in an exceptionally readable way, as Cirino moves from the decks of a 54 foot sloop on an expedition to the North Pacific Gyre – coined "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch," to collect samples from a plastic-infused ocean, (and in turn, plastic-infused fish bellies), to Kristian Syberg's lab in Denmark where all those samples were brought to be studied, to New Orleans with its toxic refineries and chemical complexes, to plastic-laden villages and beaches in Thailand, to plastic saturated Kamilo beach in Hawaii, and even back in time to 1972 when microplastics were first mentioned in scientific papers by scientists like Gerald Scott and Edward J. Carpenter. This book is not only a chronicle of Ms. Cirino's work, but also a call to action fo

Climate justice is defined as "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies."  (thesolutionsproject.org) Climate justice has been an issue for decades. There have been corporations and developers all the way back to the inception of the United States who have displaced and disenfranchised ethnic peoples and the underprivileged in the name of profit and development of their own interests. Dr. King recognized this, and spoke out against the injustices, where and when they occurred, and in his Christmas sermon of 1967, in which he said, "It all boils down to this: that all life in interrelated." Green Geezers remembers Dr. King today, and every day, for his peaceful, steadfast, and indefatigable support of equal rights for everyone, and continue to be inspired by his extraordinary example

 Tar sands are the most land wasteful, all around filthy, horrible for the environment, life-threatening form of energy in existence right now. Here's why I say that: What are tar sands? Tar sands, or oil sands, are a mixture of mostly sand, clay, water, and bitumen , which is what all the fuss – and filthy, water polluting, soil polluting, toxic process – is about. Bitumen is made of the same molecules as liquid oil and the same fossil fuel products are made from it. What is so bad about tar sands? The process of getting the bitumen out of the tar sand is complicated, filthy, dangerous, and expensive. Far more so than drilling for liquid oil, which is bad enough. The two ways of mining bitumen:               1)       Surface mining: The tar sands are collected, transported to a refinery, and the bitumen is separated from it 2)       "In-situ" mining: Bitumen is changed into liquid state by heating it with steam, underground, where it occurs naturally. Obv

  Okay, there are times when a girl just needs a Kahlua and Cream. Even on Meatless Mondays. My first oat milk test was a vegan alternative to my fav "I-need-a-drink" go-to for Meatless Mondays – because Mondays can be tough, right? Oat milk has become my go-to dairy milk alternative , which has the same amount of calcium, I was surprised to find, and, heh, heh, heh, a little experiment struck me. I loaded a glass with ice, filled it two-thirds full with oat milk and topped it off with Kahlua. Score! Sweet and yummy! Done. (I may give vanilla-flavored oat milk a whirl for this particular thing… I'll let you know.) With that important stride into veganism made, I decided to keep moving forward.   When sampling vegan products , I try not to compare them too much to their animal product counterparts. I will say, when I taste-tested oat milk at first, I found it tasted like the milk after you've eaten all the Cheerios out of it. Oaty.   Hence, oat milk. If you drink

  Youth Unstoppable – Documentary Film WaterBear | Youth Unstoppable   https://www.waterbear.com/watch/feature/61409922252d3b1812d153b8  Filmed, narrated, and produced by Slater Jewell-Kemker Distributed by Waterbear.com This Green Geezer highly recommends Youth Unstoppable, a 2021 documentary about the rise of the Global Youth Movement – which, incidentally, did not start with the adolescents in this film, but with adolescents already concerned decades earlier. Slater Jewell-Kemker had, by the age of 14, seen so much more of the world than most adults at retirement age. And I'm not talking class trips to Paris to visit the Eiffel Tower. I'm talking flooded villages near Kathmandu Nepal, caused by severe monsoon seasons. I'm talking Alberta plane rides over the Fort Chippewa tar sands the size of Florida . And yes, I'm talking Paris – but not the touristy side of Paris – the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conferences, during, incidentally, the year that Pari