Category: The SDGs – 18 Blogs to give an overview and context to the SDGs- Read on…

Introduction

Posted on by Mother Earth

Mother Earth/ Gaia ‘s Blog
Earth year 4,492,056,017

Mankind, My children!

Please listen to my story. I was born 4.5 billion years ago and for most of my life I was a lonely, barren and uninhabited rock floating through space. Then a miracle happened and to my great joy, I gradually changed into a planet with my land, oceans and air teaming with life and vegetation and all living eco systems in harmonious balance. I was delighted and proud to be a mother to such profusion of life and to become known throughout the Universe as the “blue” planet.

Mankind taking over the world

Photo: Courtesy of WWF

If the whole of my history to date was shown as 1 single hour, then in just the last few seconds of that hour, you, Mankind, were born and because of your energy and intelligence you became my favourites. I let you dominate, bully and exploit my other children, did not discipline you enough when you were young, did not teach you right from wrong and continually made excuses for your bad behaviour and kept forgiving you. As a result, I now see that I spoiled you. You came to think that the whole of Earth and its resources were yours for the taking and that no one else mattered. In your greed and uncaring way, you took whatever you wanted without ever asking for my permission or thinking about the consequences of your actions on other species sharing the planet and even on yourselves. That is why I am now writing to you as individuals directly to try to explain the problem more clearly and to show you what needs to be done to nurse me and your species back to health.

Did you know that

  • About 66 million primary school children attend classes hungry and 795 million people around the world are undernourished while 1.3 billion tonnes of food ends of rotting in bins or spoiling worldwide?
  • More than 1 billion people do not have access to fresh water and at least 1.8 billion people have to use drinking water that is polluted with human toilet waste?
  • One in 10 persons lives on less than $1.90 per day and 736 million people still live in extreme poverty?
  • Each day 1000 children die due to preventable water and sanitation related diarrhea diseases ?

What can YOU do?

Each week, for the next few weeks, I will give you some basic facts and information about one of the major problems facing both of us and which will influence our survival. In particular, I will challenge you each day and ask What can you do? (get used to this expression and challenge. This will be abbreviated to and pronounced as WCYDo (wich – ee – do) and I will be using this a lot in coming blogs!). After giving you some facts, I will suggest a number of simple actions that you, your family and friends can do to contribute to a solution. Please encourage others to befriend me and read my blogs and pass on the facts and proposed actions to all your family, friends and acquaintances. Ask them to then pass these on to their friends and acquaintances with the same instructions so that we can multiply the efforts to maximise our impact and to build a movement to take effective action to save us both.

Our work will start next week and tell others to join us to view these blog posts and to visit us on Facebook and Twitter to sign up for our newsletter and follow us. Get ready!

1. Poverty

1. Poverty

Posted on by Mother Earth

SDG 1, Poverty         Earth year 4,492,056,017
Mother Earth/ Gaia‘s Blog

Mankind, My children

Last week in my introductory blog I asked that you commit to following my blogs each week for the next few weeks to give me a chance to explain the important issues affecting our joint survival. I was pleased to see that Mankind appears to have at last begun to recognise the risks and is taking action but you need to make sure the promises of the leaders are delivered.

I would like to now give you some basic facts about the biggest and most important Global issues that need to be addressed and what sorts of actions you should take. In today’s Blog post I want to talk about SDG 1 – POVERTY.

By Jonathan McIntosh (Own work) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The problem

Did you know that the highest poverty rates are found in small conflict affected countries and that every day 42,000 people have to abandon their homes to seek  protection from conflict or war? Do you feel guilty when watching TV reports about the extremely poor and the starving children in refugee camps that you see when there are reports of disasters and catastrophes? Have you ever thought about what YOU might do to help make the world a better place where such poverty and suffering could be reduced? Now is your chance to do something!

The facts

  • 736 million people live in extreme poverty
  • One in ten persons in developing world lives on less than $1.90 a day
  • Agriculture is the single largest employer and and the biggest source of income for 40% of the global population and the largest source of income for poor households

What Can You Do?

  1. Buy fair trade fruit once a week to help poor farmers
  2. Buy a fair trade (non fruit) product once a month to help poor workers
  3. Donate to charities, such as www.oxfam.org, www.care.org, www.savethechildren.net
  4. Share the facts about Poverty to family and friends so they do it too

Tell others to join our group ask them to visit our Facebook and Twitter pages to sign up for the newsletter and information about our forthcoming launch of a WCYDo APP.

See you on my next blog, which will be on the topic of HUNGER!