Barren Land

Image Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/funkcanna/295165511/

I lower my head, and struggle against the wilt

The beautiful yellow orb in the sky once my savior

Now my demise

My roots reach down as far as they can

But come up short of the liquid of life

Is it because of man?

My leaves are turning brown, and shriveling away

I don't know how much longer

I can go on living this way

There are theories, discussions, politics and strife

All of those things seem miniscule to me now

All I want is my life

I look down to the earth

Once my greatest ally and friend

Sadness rips through my heart

To see this barren land

I long for the days

When we were gifted by the sky

I look up to the cloudless blue

And I try not to cry

Soon my roots will tire, my leaves will fall

And I will shrivel away

I try my best to go on, to stay strong

In hopes of change

If only for today

The Human Experience

"Really, it doesn't matter who you are, what your background is. You can converse on that experience. And that is what makes us human."-Makoto Fujimura

After two full months, 10,000 miles, and 16 states we have opened the eyes of over 20,000 children and teachers to the amazing wonders of the rain forest. We have also met more incredible people and done more amazing things than I could have ever hoped for. It's hard to sum up all these experiences in one blog post, so I'm going to talk about the things that have moved me the most, and how I have changed as a person.

Purple states we have taught at, blue we have only driven through. 

This journey has been one of the most moving and richest experiences of my life so far. I have met people that have restored my faith in humanity almost everywhere I go. For example, there was a kind young family that invited us into their home in West Virginia for a home cooked meal. They may never know how deeply grateful and impacted we were by this loving gesture. There was a nice selfless young man who went out of his way to come to one of our shows and film us, so that our families can see what we are doing every day. There was an incredible Indian man who talked with us for hours about the drastic change in the ecosystems and in the mind set of people in India, and discussed the philosophy of conservation with us in a perspective we have never heard of. 

The assistant principal showing us the nature trails the kids created behind the schools. 

There was a passionate and driven assistant principal at a school in South Carolina, whose efforts to create a school garden, greenhouse, and nature trail have succeeded in so many ways at opening the children up to their impact on the environment, and had drastically improved the behavior of many troubled teens. There was an older couple we met and had dinner with who went on and on about how important our work is to them, and that they can rest easier knowing that when they leave this earth someone will still be fighting for it. Lastly, there was a guy we met and became close friends with, who after seeing our animals and our passion for what we are doing, decided to start recycling and looking closer at the impact he has on the environment. He has said that seeing these creatures and listening to our passion and motivation has broadened his perspective on the world around him in ways he would have never thought about.

One of the most rewarding experiences has been all the different children from different backgrounds we have met across the country. We have had countless kids at each show come up and ask us how we got this job, because they want to work with animals and save the rain forest when they grow up. This is what makes my heart the happiest, seeing little Ambers and little Jessicas in the crowd whose enthusiasm for nature shines brightly on their faces. We tell them how we went to college for Fisheries and Wildlife, and how they can do something similar to that like biology or zoology. Their faces light up each time and I can just see them starting to plan their future around this two minute conversation we have had with them. Many children have stood out in the crowd after talking to them, and I will never forget some of the things they have said. One little girl came up to us and said she started a rain forest club with her friends called the "Yapok Club" (apparently named after a rain forest animal that I had not even heard of yet.) She was so excited and enthusiastically nerdy about it, I couldn't help but feel like I was talking to the seven year old version of myself. After hearing that the rain forest is being destroyed at an incredibly fast rate, one little boy came up to me afterwards and said "Miss Amber, When I'm president one day, I'm going to make it a law that we can't cut down any more rain forest." This moved me to tears as I told him thank you for that, and how happy that makes us. 

Jess and I enjoying a hike in a Georgia swamp :)

Before this job my hopes for our future were spread thin and bleak, which is understandable if you simply pick up a newspaper anymore. All you will read about are environmental disasters, animals being driven into extinction and humans continuing to blindly march down the path of destroying our world. After teaching, seeing and reaching over 20,000 kids from across the country, my hopes have gotten much higher. At the end of the show I tell them that in twenty years, you guys will be in charge of this earth because you are the future. I then ask them if you don't care about the rain forest or any other ecosystem that's in dire need of help, who will? They get very serious yet enthusiastic, as if I've given them a challenge that they will follow for the rest of their lives to care about and protect our earth. This fills my bucket every single time, and in the faces and hearts of these children is where my hope for our world lies.  

These rich human experiences that we have encountered in the last couple of months have changed me forever. I will never forget the moments I shared with people who started out as strangers and became amazing friends all over the country. I will never forget the children whose minds we have touched, and who have touched our hearts in return. My eyes have been opened even wider, my heart even greater, and I have soaked up every story, every lesson, and every moment with each incredible person we have had the privilege to meet. I believe life is about always leaving behind more than you take, and connecting with people and with our world on a intellectually intimate level. I feel like I have lived more in the past two months than I have in my entire life, and for that I will be forever grateful. 

The Heart's Storm

The storm is brewing. I feel the cool breeze on my neck, the rustle of the leaves and my hair whipping against my face. This storm has been shaping for a couple of hours already, but the one in my heart has been quietly brewing for a long time, thundering in the distance since my birth. Each year my shell has cracked a little more, my intellect has widened and the facade built around me has slowly started to crumble. Something is growing inside me, something I brought into this world with me, more dangerous than a weapon, more powerful than an army.

Through childhood it brought me to curiosity, dared me to ask questions, and drew me outside more often than I can remember. Through adolescence it brought me confusion, alienation from my peers, a feeling of guilt heavy as a quarry, a burden too big for a girl's shoulders to bear. It began to grow in me like a virus, but I didn’t want it to stop, I only wanted to understand it.

Through college it began to unravel before me the more I studied. I learned of the consequences disguised as triumphs of our civilization that we as a human race have brought onto this world. The guilt was replaced with anger, the burden with hatred. The more I learned the more questions swam in my head. Why must we control all “resources”, manage all species, decide what to exploit and what to protect? For a people so entranced by religious deities all over the world, were we not putting ourselves into a god-like position? The earth is literally falling apart at the seams, but we put our blinders of ignorance and greed on, and we march swiftly and strongly forward towards the cliff which we are bound to fall off in the name of progress.

 Air pollution, water pollution, fisheries depletion, deforestation, rising water levels, massive amounts of extinction, exploitation and depletion of natural resources in a couple of centuries when most took millions of years to produce. We must be blind, deaf and dumb to keep all these realities out of our pretty little façade we’ve built up around us, filling our heads with sorting our recyclables, maintaining wildlife refuges and donating some money to “save our oceans” every year, thinking that these things will make the destruction go away, all the while we are being swept away with the current of the river that our society has created and are going to end up cascading off into a 1,000 foot fall.

Part of the thing growing inside me since birth is not answers but questions. How did things get to be this way? Were humans created with inherent flaw and desire to destroy the world? Where did we go wrong? And the other part of what has been bursting at the seams inside my mind is not an idea, but a memory. A memory that I did not experience directly, but my ancestors experienced and lived over 500 generations ago. 

This memory is of humans living within the community of life, not apart from it. Humans just like you and I, taking what they needed, leaving what they didn’t. Humans that didn’t have a need to kill off all their competition or wage war based on the beliefs of different religious deities. These humans lived in close family groups, and had no need to slave away at an 8-5 job that they hated only to pay off their bills, for wealth was not coveted, prized and possessed or unequally hoarded. There was no need to create religious deities and doctrines all over the world in order to be told how to live, because these humans knew how to live in a way that had worked for over 200,000 years. Today’s way of living has been around a mere 10,000 years, which is a blink of an eye for such a massive destruction of the earth to take place.

My ancestors knew the key to life that allowed them to live peacefully in the world. They lived as one of earth’s species, all woven together side by side like the beautiful tapestry that is life. They did not try to make order, control and dominate every aspect of the earth. They knew what we have ignorantly forgotten; the earth was not made for us, we were made for the earth.

Yet here we are today, trying to take control over every process and species that takes place on earth, and if nature doesn’t listen to us (which inevitable does and will happen) we will try to tighten the reigns and dominate even more. We are essentially at war with our world, yet what we don’t realize is if the world loses the battle, what have we really won?

There are still people all over living peacefully on this earth like my ancestors once did, yet our culture points and laughs and teaches us to find them barbaric and primitive. They are living the way our ancestors successfully lived for 200,000 years, yet we are taught to see them as failures, missing out on the joys of a proper human existence, complete with air conditioning, French manicured nails and funnel cakes. And after exterminating, enslaving and confining to prisons disguised as reservations most of these people, we are bound and determined to wipe the last of them out, because their homes are worth millions as exploited resources and they stand in the way of progress.

Yet I’m sure everyone has had that brief awakening from the amnesia we have suffered from our “civilized” lifestyle and asked “Is there more to life than this?” The answer is yes, there is, and there has been for a very long time. As we plow through the jungles, trek across the deserts and sail the oceans to knock down the walls of these last living remnants of our successful and peaceful ancestors in order to flood our way of life over every corner of the earth to gain progress, ask yourselves, what are we really gaining, and more importantly, what will we be losing?

Today I Remember A Friend...

Today I remember a friend. He was funny, friendly and so very bright. I spent his last day on earth with him doing something that he loved: exploring a Puerto Rican rainforest and learning about our natural world.  He taught me about all the different gastropods, which might make some people glaze over, but to him it was fascinating. His enthusiasm for the natural world was contagious. He loved his family and friends, and excitedly called them up on his last day to tell him what he had experienced in the rain forest.

After you collapsed on the streets of San Juan Brian, we did everything we could. We held you, tried to resuscitate you, and called for help so many times. Nothing we did helped, and to this day I struggle with that. But we were there by your side holding you as you passed on out of this life and into the next. And I am so grateful for having been there for you.

Today I remember a friend whose life was not meaningless, but full of purpose. Knowing him and being there on that fateful night with him has forever changed my life. I open my eyes in the morning and am so grateful for everything that I can see, hear, touch and taste. I never take life for granted, and tell my family and friends what they mean to me all the time. Brian you taught me that life isn’t fair and not guaranteed for anyone. You taught me to enjoy every minute of it, because no one knows when it is their time to leave this earth.

I miss you so much, but I will never forget you and all the things I have learned from you. You have changed my life for the better and I feel gifted for having known you. Thank you for that Brian.

Music Messages

What is today's top hit music telling us?

As I was listening to a modern hit music station on my way to school, I was struck by the feeling of wanting to go downtown and let loose with my friends. I realized that the music was literally changing my mood, and was making me excited about about hanging out and not having a care in the world. The songs glorification of drinking and partying allowed me to feel this way. And I wondered, what is today's hit music really telling us?

After looking up America's Top 40, I started to look through the lyrics of each song. I made a data table to search each song for one of the following lyrical messages:

• Sex
• Drugs
• Alcohol
• Clubbing
• Profanity
• Women Degradation 
• Hate
• No Education
• Racial Slurs
• Violence
• Greed
• Kindness
• Uplifting 
• Love
• God

The results were alarming yet not surprising. The six most prominent messages relayed by these hit songs are sex, alcohol, profanity, women degradation, love and clubbing. See pie graph below.

After this I was interested in if the gender of the artist played a role in what messages are relayed. The following graphs the percentage of the message relayed to the sex of the artist. 

Presented with these two different aspects on music messages, you can draw your own conclusions. I find several things alarming about the second graph, and feel the need to point them out.

 Of the messages promoting the degradation of women, female artists are responsible for the same 38% as male artists. This is shocking evidence that women in the music industry feel the need to adhere to the standards that the male dominated industry sustains of women. 

Another interesting point is that 15% of female artists glorify being "dumb" or not educated, where 0% of men sing about this. Is it a need for a best selling female artist to dumb herself down and "sexified"* herself up in order to sell records?

Although my inquiry is not a comprehensive scientific review of the subconscious messages of today's hit music, it does raise some concerned questions about what sells in today's music industry. I think further follow up on what would these graphs look like 20 years ago, or what they would they look like if you were looking at another country's Top 40 would be interesting, and might be something I look into next. 

The next time you are listening to your favorite tunes pay attention to how it makes you feel. Then ask yourself what exactly is this song telling me? You might be surprised. 

*"Sexified" is a word Ke$ha used in her song "We R who we R" (Which is currently number 1)

America's Top 40

http://www.at40.com/

13 Weeks

Walking outside today the frozen air hits you first in the face, then seeps through your coat, pants, even socks and shoes. As I make the short walk to campus in this weather one word floods my brain and helps me to stay warm. Namibia. In 13 weeks I will be getting on a plane that is headed 1000s of miles East to a continent that has long captured my imagination, curiosity and passion: Africa.

It has been four years since I have been to Africa. In 2007 a couple of days after high school graduation I got on a South Africa bound plane to work on a conservation effort in Makalali Game Reserve near Hoedspruit, South Africa. After returning from my three week trip there has not been a week that has gone by without my longing to be back in the land of our early ancestors.

Now this year, a couple days after I graduate from the University of Nebraska with a Bachelors of Science degree in Fisheries and Wildlife, I will be Africa-bound once more. We will be in Namibia for 3 weeks, studying their culture, policies, land, animals and the way they manage wildlife conservation.

I try not to think about it too much, hoping that will help the time fly by faster. But on days like today when the cold finds me vulnerable, the traffic is unruly, the smell of exhaust and city pollution consumes me, I allow myself to think about Namibia and the serene haven that awaits me there in 13 weeks.