Progressive Wednesday

The Grandeur of Earth Day: Animals

April 11th, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday

Animals:

Okay, my pretties. This one is easy as making macaroni and cheese. (Mmm… mac and cheese….)

But first, let me say this: in my lifetime, 15 species of animals have gone extinct.

According to the World Conservation Union, another 15,589 are at risk of extinction. But are we to blame? Chew on this one: “[over the] past 400 years [we] have seen 89 mammalian extinctions, almost 45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammal species are listed as critically endangered.” I believe that falls under the category of “Yes.”

So, on Tuesday, we told you about Good Search, the search engine fully powered by Yahoo, which donates half of the profits from ad revenue to the charity of your choice. So, this week, we’re asking that you only use Good Search to crawl the web, and select the WWF (the World Wildlife Foundation) as the charity. If nothing else, there’s this to love about the WWF — they forced the World Wrestling Federation to change their name to the WWE! What’s not to love?

But you want the skinny? It goes like this: the 45-year-old, non-political, global, independent, and multicultural World Wildlife Foundation strives to conserve and protect the planet’s biodiversity, promote cutting our oodles of pollution, and make sure that we use our natural resources in a sustainable fashion. How? Well, they “are currently funding around 2,000 conservation projects and employ almost 4,000 people across the planet.” And they work closely with the locals in every area where a project is focused.

Their main goal is lofty and lovely: “To stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.”

Harmony you say? Well, if you promise to use Good Search to raise some cabbage to help the WWF protect our animals — pandas to pachyderms — we’ll let you listen to two lovely tunes sung and strummed by lovely folks. (Okay, we’ll let you anyway, but use Good Search. Cool? Cool.)

“Train From Kansas City” by Neko Case http://media.anti.com/neko_case/the_tigers_have_spoken/Train_From_Kansas_City.mp3

“The Dark Don’t Hide It” by Magnolia Electric Co. http://www.scjag.com/mp3/sc/darkdonthideit.mp3