Progressive Wednesday

Give a click for books.

On a previous Wednesday (see “A Book Does a Body Good”), we highlighted some simple ways you can help your own children and other children read, and read progressive stuff to boot. And as we put it then: plenty of children don't own any books, and many others don't even have access to books outside of school. And as progressives, we owe it to children, all children, to let them have as close to the same youth as we'd want for our own. We owe them this because we want to protect innocence. And we owe them this because want a caring, intelligent, articulate, and creative generation to come. We want a better world, so we want a world with more books.

In that vein, we give you The Literacy Site, a website that offers a rare opportunity: use your mouse to click one digital button and help raise funds to provide books to kids in poverty. This is achieved through advertising on the site (not unlike GoodSearch.com, which we touted this past Wednesday).

They put their motives behind their mission this way:

61 percent of low-income families have no books for children in their homes. Over 80 percent of childcare centers serving low-income children lack age-appropriate books and other print materials. By providing children from low-income families with books that they can take home and keep, together we target the only variable that correlates significantly with reading scores: the number of books in the home.

So, all you’ve got to do is click this sentence to be taken to The Literacy Site. Once you’re there, just click the button that reads “Fund Books For Kids.” There. That’s it. And the beauty part is that you can take this 7-second action every single day.

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Editor’s Note: We’ve researched this a great deal, and just so you know, the aforementioned website is totally legit. Check for yourself by clicking here or here.

Healing Health Care

Problem:

We all get sick. We go to doctors. We go to hospitals. Hopefully we get better, and soon. But sometimes we don’t get decent answers. Sometimes we get answers we can barely stand. Sometimes we get answers we can’t afford.

Well, we’ve got some answers of our own.

Make Progress:

My old man was a probation officer. My mom a phys. ed. teacher. Both were unionized, and in part because of this, they both had almost ridiculously excellent family health care. Growing up, I had regular check-ups, vaccinations, trips to the dentist and ophthalmologist, and both my sister and I had braces, all covered.

For my money, it’s hard to pursue happiness if you’re sick all the time (even more so if you’re, say, five years old), or if you’re worried about doctor’s bills racking up, or if your teeth are rotting despite your best flossing and fluoridating efforts. And kids should always be able to receive more than adequate health care.

While most of us aren't doctors, we can help the health of those around us (and even ourselves). So let's, not eat, but pick four apples today.

• Click
• Mail
• Watch
• Bleed

Healing Health Care: Click

Click:

Okay, it doesn't get much easier than this action, but first the sobering facts:

• In 2005, approximately 270,000 cases of breast cancer were diagnosed in women. Imagine, for a moment, if nearly every person in Buffalo, New York had breast cancer.
• Approximately 40,000 of those women died. Of cancers, only lung cancer kills more American women.

So, what's a progressive to do? Click your mouse. Twice.

Head on over to the Breast Cancer Site, then just click your mouse on the button that reads “FUND FREE MAMMOGRAMS.– There, you've just helped fund mammograms. (We’ve vetted this. It’s legit.)

Anything else? you ask. Nope. That's it. No, wait. If you can, and we know you can, do that every day. It'll take you, what? About 17 seconds. Time, we think, well spent.

Organics for the poor (w/seven-second action).

Right now, organic food seems, at times, like a pricey luxury. Thankfully, more and more the price of this produce is coming down (thanks to increased demand, and therefore, production), and processed organic food is often similarly priced, and at times, cheaper than their genetically-modified and potentially pesticide-coated counterparts (I find this particularly true with foodstuffs like cereals, mac and cheese, and salsa).

But a new United Nations study plainly states that a shift to organic farming could, besides helping that not-so-little thing called the “environment,” also help curb world hunger. The previously held knock on such an idea was that organic farming can reduce crop yields significantly, but over time this levels off.

And according to the Associated Press:

Researchers in Denmark found… that food security for sub-Saharan Africa would not be seriously harmed if 50 percent of agricultural land in the food exporting regions of Europe and North America were converted to organic by 2020.

While total food production would fall, the amount per crop would be much smaller than previously assumed, and the resulting rise in world food prices could be mitigated by improvements in the land and other benefits, the study found.

But here’s the real perk: if farmers in sub-Saharan Africa made the switch, “it could reduce their need to import foods.” And here’s another plus: these farmers would save precious money by not needing to purchase chemicals, and earn money by exporting any extras.

Another study conducted by the University of Michigan found that:

A global shift to organic agriculture would yield at least 2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just under the world’s current production of 2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories per person per day.

So why are these new findings so significant? Well, here are the facts, Jack:

• 850 million people are chronically undernourished. That’s nearly three times the population of the United States.
• Since 1996, the number of undernourished people in the developing world has gone up by 20 million. But here’s the more upsetting fact: the number of undernourished people is continuing to rise by four million per year.
• 30% of the world’s population suffers from malnutrition.
• Nearly 24,000 people die each day as a direct result of hunger. And here’s a chilling statistic: 18,000 of those daily deaths are of children under the age of five.

So while you might not be able to start an organic farm in Africa, there is something incredibly simple you can do. Just click this sentence to be taken to The Hunger Site. Then click the button on that page labeled “HELP FEED THE HUNGRY.” There — you’ve just helped feed someone.

If you have any doubts about the legitimacy of this, you needn’t: just click here or here or here. The second link includes a citation from The New York Times.

If you just give a few clicks, you can help feed the hungry, and we know you can easily spend 7 seconds every day doing this. So give a little with your mouse button, baby, give a little.

Produce photo by this food lover.

I See Trees of Green

“[People have] made at least a start on discovering the meaning

of human life when [they] plants shade trees

under which [they know] full well [they] will never sit.–

— D. Elton Trueblood

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Problem:

I made the mistake of watching mindless television the other day, and I caught a show called Flip This House. The premise of the show is this: a hot-shot buys a dump of a house, renovates the hell out of it, and tries to sell it for a sizeable profit pronto. On this particular episode, the temporary far-too-capitalistic owner decided to cut down an 80-year-old maple to, and I quote: “Make the property look, I don't know, you know, more modern.– And I literally thought: Poor tree. It was like watching someone chainsaw and wood-chipper my grandma. Well, okay, it wasn't quite like that, but it still sucked like a Dirt Devil. I had to change the channel, and instead I watched a woman get a tattoo of a fire-breathing butterfly on her chest. (I wish I could make up stuff like that.)

We've written about trees a lot already (see here, here, here and here). But we're here again today, getting a jump on April 27: Arbor Day. And besides, there's much more — more than we can even cover this Wednesday — to type about the topic. Why? Two reasons:

1. We're kind of addicted to tree products: toilet paper, sheds, pink tissues, paintings, houses, paper towels, Christmas napkins, fences, Coaco Puffs cereal boxes, chairs, tables, barns, books, Happy Birthday banners, park benches, condos, Marlboro Ultra Lights, wallpaper, ceiling fans, hell, even letters to our aforementioned grandmothers. We're not trying to suggest we don't need this stuff (especially the Coaco Puffs). Most of it we do. But we (and by “we– I mean almost every single one of us including your friendly-neighborhood editors at Progressive Wednesday) forget about how this stuff came to be.

2. Trees are beautiful. We treat them like they're not.

And, if we needed more reasons to reconsider our treatment of trees, then there are these six brand-spanking-new troubling and weird facts about trees:

• The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed at twice the rate once suspected.
• Billboard owners in Georgia will soon be able to clear-cut up to thousands of trees covering several acres to make it easy to read their drivel on a single sign.
• The second largest rainforest in the world is located in the Congo. And despite a moratorium on logging there, “over 37 million acres of rainforest have already been granted to the logging industry, [in spite of] the fact that the area is vital for its biodiversity.–
• Tasmania is using banned chemicals to (wait for it) blow up trees.
• Global warming — which is partially fueled by Amazon deforestation — is actually causing spruce trees to grow in the Artic tundra, endangering animals that thrive on this land normally covered by permafrost.
• According to a recent article in Time, “900 million [trees] every year become pulp and paper.–

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Make Progress:

When I sat down and thought about it this week (and I don't mean on the couch in my shrink's office), I realized that I have fond memories of trees. I spent much of my youth in very, very rural America. The current population of my town? 1,488. I'm shocked we even have a zip code. The number of traffic lights? One. It serves no other purpose than decoration. While my area was short on, you know, humans, I did grow up surrounded by beautiful trees.

Swamp elms, silver maples, crabapples, pines, a redbud, a king crimson maple, ornamental pear trees, a little leaf linden, arborvitae, ash, and a river birch thrived in our yard. My parents planted a dwarf red delicious tree, an early Macintosh, a peach tree. We picked fresh fruits and gobbled them up, often able to eat an apple a day. Come early autumn, my mother peeled, pulverized and presser-cooked the fruits into jars of homemade applesauce.

My sister and I called the undeveloped land next to our house “the woods,– and we climbed trees, played with our pals, built forts, swung on vines, and sought out rabbits and groundhogs and squirrels. When a tree died in our yard, my old man pulled out an ax, and we stacked firewood to warm us during the frigid winters. Summers, our trees filled with robins, sparrows, and doves, and I woke, not to an alarm clock, but to the songs of birds.

As stewards of the environment, we have a duty to help trees, those towering plants, flourish. For the sake of the air, the animals, and, lest we forget, ourselves, let us celebrate Arbor Day the right way.

• Plant
• Click
• Write
• Recycle
• Join

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I See Trees of Green: Click

Click:

Okay, people. This one's easy as a fried egg given one spatula flip. All you've got to do is give two clicks. First, click this sentence to be taken to the Rainforest Site (you can read more about this organization here). Then click the button that reads “Preserve Endangered Land– on that page. There — you've just help save some of the rainforests you generous little devil you. According to the site, over the past seven years “more than 153 million visitors have clicked to save more than 40,500 acres of habitat.–

This website is run by the good folks over at Charity USA, a for-profit organization that funds hunger, health care, animal, literacy, and ecological reform through advertising. If you purchase Rainforest Site gear, you can help raise even more of the green (pun intended). We researched this high and low and high again, and it's completely legit.