Humbled & Grateful

it's how I feel today, it feels so surreal
"I keep trying to figure it out, but it seems that now that I know that what I'm doing is dreaming, I can do whatever I want, I have so many options, and that's what Life is about.. it's up to me, I'm the Dreamer"

#BAD09

As said yesterday, today is the Climate Change theme on Blog Action Day. Not having prepared my own, here are a couple of interesting takes:
UNICEF's tale, firstly, followed by David Milliband's.

How climate change impacts children

“Go Green” has become a popular catch-phrase over the last few years, with campaigns encouraging everything from recycling to driving electric cars to eating organic chickens. We all know that reducing our carbon footprint is important for future generations. What you may not know is that climate change is about more than just ensuring the future of the planet’s resources—it is a very present and real danger to millions of those most vulnerable to its harmful effects: the world’s children.

... and

The UK is doing its bit– the first country to set legally binding targets to cut its carbon footprint and the first to set carbon budgets to limit emissions. But we, and the rest of the world, have a massive challenge in front of us. The window of action to avoid catastrophic climate change is closing and agreement at Copenhagen is by no means certain.

All countries must come together to face the shared threat. There will have to be compromise, but there cannot be compromise on the ambition – to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees, we need nothing less than a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050. I hope the voices raised today will help us near our goal.

this year's Blog Action Day

just how powerful are words?

the question of meaningfulness was raised last year, but then it returned: Blog Action Day came back this year, with a plea against Poverty.

some [myself included] might tend to think of this in terms of rights and duties and point that the debate is not a debate at all, given the non-contested existence of the 2nd generation of human rights, the so-referred-to Socio-Economic & Cultural Rights; after all, the World already did commit in this direction when creating the ICESCR, haven't we?... [and that was a while ago!]

others [much more pragmatic] think of devising solutions to address the root cause and thus use the Internet to more obvious purposes: Ripple is a case in point, whilst the Washington Post gives a handful of other examples.

and yet, there are also those who wonder what's the efficiency of having bloggers address Poverty today, when words might amount to nothing by tomorrow: here's the full article.

How much will bad#08 manage to accomplish still remains to be seen, but we can all see why addressing a topic might be more helpful than keeping silent; and the current financial crisis should prove as an incentive in this respect. As for the "why" of it, that's self-referential:

poverty, n.

1. The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.

[definition taken from here]


http://blogactionday.org/js/72216bd17ad528d3530995144bbaf25846e4d835