Tomorrow is International Earth Day – and the 50th anniversary of the world’s largest civic environmental movement.
Its mission to educate and activate, to demand leaders take science seriously and call for action across society to protect the planet and make a better world has never been more urgent. This year, the Earth Day Network is going digital and hosting 24 hours of live-streamed events and action. You can follow and join the action using the hashtag #EarthDay2020.
Over the 24 hours of Earth Day, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day will fill the digital landscape with global conversations, calls to action, performances, video teach-ins and more. - Earth Day Network
You can read about how it all started here in an interview with Denis Hayes - coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970.
The Earth Day Flag - including The Blue Marble, taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972
The call to prioritise nature and join forces is clear.
Business as Usual is no longer a viable or sustainable option.
“I believe that reforestation is everybody’s responsibility. We can’t keep taking from nature without giving back – the Earth needs us to act now. We must fall back in love with nature. Humanity needs to collaborate and become part of a massive global regenerative movement. The restoration of the natural world and our communities is key to a thriving planet for all. I encourage you all to join us and become the voice and guardians of the Earth.” Nicoleta Carpineanu, Founder Forests Without Frontiers
We call on everyone to put the earth first, to collaborate in the effort to save our planet. Whether you're a business, or an individual we'd love to hear from you - we can all work together to reforest and regenerate our planet, our home.
We had plans for a party…
As you would expect from a gathering of musicians and artists for the planet, Forests Without Frontiers was planning an event. A celebration of the natural world, a celebration of what we’ve achieved and the launch of our Art for Earth and Cities for Earth campaigns. It was all set to be a multi-media art and music shindig for Momma Earth, calling together all our artists and musicians friends to join our founder DJ Nico de Transilvania on stage in Brighton to spread hope, raise funds and motivate others to join.
We had plans to bring together artists, musicians, local businesses, activists and politicians to get the city of Brighton and Hove to come together as one for the launch. We were going to raise funds and plant trees in Europe’s Amazon and support local re-wilding projects and put the planet firmly before profit.
It would have been fun. Probably quite a lot of friendly touching and hugs*. There’s not much room for active social distancing on a dance floor! We were all looking forward to having a party for the Earth in our hometown.
But…the world had other ideas.
There’s a new reality now. Covid-19 is with us. Much of human life on Earth has been grounded. Life has changed in so many ways for so many.
And music, the arts and dancing together for the planet is not deemed essential, apparently. The music and arts industry has been shaken to its foundations. This list of cancelled festivals and events grows every day.
Fortunately, the creativity of the human species is finding many ways to work around that, from dancing policemen, balcony singing in our major cities to live family DJ sets from the Junior Fat Boy Slim and the One World: Together At Home concert to support frontline healthcare workers and the WHO, the artist in us all has come out en masse.
We released the latest mix from Muzica Without Frontiers: Vol.5 - Dream a Beautiful Dream. It’s out there, and it’s free. We hope you enjoy it.
We have all been made to stop, pause, reflect, adapt.
People are suffering. For those of us privileged enough to be safe at home, stunned perhaps by how the coronavirus pandemic has turned life upside down, we are also being handed an opportunity to reflect. For many, it is a time to slow down and take a long hard look at where we have been, where we are at and how we move forward together – as individuals, as organisations, and as societies.
This is the new normal. And it’s time to adapt.
Forests Without Frontiers is barely 18 months old. Our baby is but a tender sapling. And this has hit our organisation hard. We had to move fast and respond to what we were being called to do in this time. But only once we had taken the time to listen, deeply.
We could have taken our event online. Focused all the efforts of our small team to make us fully digital and run a live-streamed event. But we chose not to. Instead we chose to answer the call we heard and put our action where it would make the most difference and was most needed.
What began in 2018 has taken great leaps and bounds… FWF started in November 2018 when our founder decided to donate money from her album to tree planting in the area where the musicians lived. Our first oak trees were planted in April 2018 and launched a pilot project of re-wilding of oak pastures. Since then we have also planted 25,000 trees (spruce, beech and mountain maple), with your help and incredible ongoing support. And we have big plans for the future.
Incredibly, we planted 10,000 beech saplings this April.
Tree planting can help the economy and fight climate change. Here is a recent article from the World Resources Institute about the economic and environmental impact of tree planting.
Thanks to our supporters and the skill and dedication of our partners Foundation Conservation Carpathia and their forest rangers, our Spring 2020 plantation has gone ahead, despite the global chaos.
Working under strict guidelines with expert supervision our team of local workers has planted 10,000 beech trees in the Fagaras Mountains this April.
It means people get paid at a time they really need it. Land that has been ravaged by illegal logging can be repaired and begin to regenerate. A remarkable achievement. After thinking a crucial planting season would be missed due to lockdown restrictions, we are blown away by the dedicated and devotion of our team and the team at FCC.
(The illegal logging in Romania didn’t stop because of the pandemic by the way. It didn’t stop in the Amazon either, or the Philippines. Neither did the “legal” destruction of ancient woodlands in the UK for the HS2 programme despite a legal challenge made by BBC broadcaster and Environmentalist, Chris Packham in April. But more on that another time…)
We answered the urgent call to protect forest elders.
As the situation escalated, we realised there was other work we needed to do in the area where we plant our trees.
We needed to support the communities living there.
In Nucsoara village, close to our plantation, 51 Elders were identified as needing vital support, so we launched an appeal for funds to get food boxes to them urgently, working with FCC. It’s something that is integral to what we are all about, and our work in this area will expand.
Connecting with the elders, learning from their traditions and what they have to teach us about nature, is part of the grand plan for Forests Without Frontiers and central to our new Elders For Earth initiative. Something to be grown when the current situation subsides. We trust it too will find its way.
The current crisis tells us what indigenous elders have been telling us for years.
“The coronavirus is telling the world what Indigenous Peoples have been saying for thousands of years — if we do not help protect biodiversity and nature, we will face this and even worse threats,” said Levi Sucre Romero, a BriBri Indigenous person from Costa Rica and co-coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests.
You can continue to support our urgent appeal until further notice. Help us to keep feeding our forest elders during this difficult time.
We also started hugging trees.
Because well, we needed to.
We launched a campaign called #hugatreenotme to plant a tree for every picture that people share of them hugging a tree with this hashtag and @forestswithoutfrontiers.
At a time when we are isolated, we wanted to do something to remind us of our connection to nature and to each other, and to keep spirits up.
We encourage everyone to get out on Earth Day to hug a tree – or if that’s not possible, perhaps there’s a plant indoors instead. Or even a picture of you hugging a tree will work!
Follow us on instagram and get tagging.
All things are connected. There is no return to normal.
For one thing this pandemic has shown us more than anything, is how we are all connected… how people across the globe are connected… and how in a wider, tangible sense we are all part of nature. This virus, this pandemic, can be linked to our mistreatment of nature. We cut trees, we kill wildlife, we don’t respect mother earth.
Until we as human beings change our behaviour things will not change. Humanity will not survive.
Whether you believe nature is directly retaliating against deforestation, or whether it's a wake-up call from God, or whether you deny humanity played any role in the outbreak - it’s clear that we as humankind are not in control. And it’s clear we cannot maintain our out of balance, exploitative relationship with this planet if we want to survive.
Destroying natural habitats such as the virgin forests creates the perfect conditions for mass pandemics to arrive.
“A number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases.” - John Vidal.
“Respect Your Mother” taken at #fridaysforfuture march in London, 2019
Photo Credit: Emma Wallace
The link between deforestation and viral diseases has never been more clear:
“Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans.” - UN’s environment chief, Inger Andersen
People talk about when life will get back to normal. The reality is, it won’t. Life will not be ‘normal’ or as it was again. And this could be a very good thing. This is a time, an opportunity, as Arundhati Roy put it so eloquently in her essay “The Pandemic is a Portal”, to rethink the ‘doomsday machine’ we have built for ourselves. It’s a gateway for us to walk through, ready to imagine another world and ready to fight for it.
It’s time to move on to a better way of living. A way that is balanced, kinder and fairer. A world that puts nature at the heart of everything.
What we urgently need and call for now is a regenerative way of existing.
It is our hope, our vision, and central to our work that restoring nature is now properly financed. The laudable 1% for the Planet initiative has achieved great things and raised over $250 million for incredible projects. But it is not enough.
A recent letter from the Planetary Emergency Partnership in the Financial Times to all leaders, calls them to put climate and biodiversity at the top of the agenda:
“We call on leaders to have the courage, wisdom and foresight to seize the opportunity to make their economic recovery plans transformative for people and nature.”
Our governments and businesses are not acting with the priority to regenerate and protect. We are not funding the restoration quickly enough or taking strong enough steps to stop destruction and introduce ecocide laws despite more than fifty years of Earth Day actions and environmental campaigning from scientists and activists alike. Despite the increasingly more vocal global actions in 2019 from the youth movement Fridays for Future and the international actions and key demands of Extinction Rebellion in Spring and Autumn last year, the majority of our global and national leadership continues to act in the interest of the corporation over the interest of the planet and the people.
The New Yorker article “If We’re Bailing Out Corporations, They Should Bail Out the Planet” nails it.
“Our goal can’t be simply a return to the status-quo ante, because that old normal was driving a climate crisis that will eventually prove every bit as destructive as a pandemic.”
And we will leave you with a beautiful essay written by Charles Eisenstein who is close to our project and an amazing human being , called The Coronation .
“No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.”
With so much love
All for Earth!
Jane Dunford, Emma Wallace and Nicoleta Carpineanu - April 21st, 2020