This blogpost is part of the search engine site, Earthsayers.org, which is preparing to be updated in early 2024. The search engine and its archive is a service of the organization EarthSayers Network which includes both the search engine amplifying the voices of sustainability (all video) and the EarthSayers Fund, a gifting program in the service of sustainability to advance non-profits addressing sustainability.
For more information please contact Ruth Ann Barrett at ruthann@earthsayers.tv.
To download a report, click on the cover image.
Curation of COVID-19 research provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) on mandates and workplaces from a marketing perspective. Includes findings of Monster.com study, Fall 2021 Hiring Report.
Key messaging recommendations base on the latest Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) article, “Religious” Exemptions Add Legal Thorns to Looming Vaccine Mandates
September 8, 2021 “The Latest.” Article here.
Copywriting tips to convert “maybe” folks to “yes” and getting vaccinated now.
It is recommended those engaged in social media use these guides to post relevant, helpful, and effective posts that move people to get vaccinated.
Earlier COVID-19 reports and white papers are published on pdxdowntowner.com.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call or text me at 415-377-1835.
Ruth Ann Barrett, Portland, Oregon
We love rituals. We think that rituals mark the rhythm of life, create spaces for breathing and pausing, like the rhythm given to a melody. Four years ago we at Minervas.org invented a ritual, which is to go to downtown Fort Lauderdale in February, and connect with the many people lingering in the square, most of them homeless. Why February? Because reflecting on the many messages related to Valentine’s Day, we couldn’t help but thinking of where is love for those that are the ‘unseen’? So off we go, with one purpose: to connect.
We see connection as a sacred moment. With words, through the eyes, in silence or in a smile, the moment of connecting is expressing: I see you, you see me, I am because you are.
It Could Have Been Me
This year, it was even more special. A block away from the square there was a large gathering of families, parents, teachers, and students expressing their feelings for the recent school shooting. Sadness, pain, anger, and rage claiming attention from the political representatives to protect the schools, the children, the population. We want better gun laws, gun restrictions, and safer schools. We the people, was the message in the image of hundreds of mothers, fathers and children holding up homemade signs with their simple and powerful words. It could have been me.
I am because you are. You are because I am.
Saved from Clothfabric.com
If that is so, then there are no strangers here. What is our personal responsibility, our contribution to the situations we face? If we are all connected, like spots on a large fabric, how may we –unintentionally- be part of the problem? One answer may be in how we participate in democratic processes, in the civic life. Are we paying attention, speaking up, expressing our outrage or our values, or are we silent bystanders? Or living room complainers?
Who are we electing, and how are we helping to keep the elected officials honest, accountable? It is clear that the proliferation of guns is part of the problem. Guns call to be used. But there is more than guns.
In a recent school board session one person shared about an organization that trains teachers and school staff to notice behaviors in children, starting with first graders. Trained to pay attention to absenteeism, to introverted attitudes and to angry behaviors, teachers learn to identify children who may be going through difficult situations. They then engage psychologists, social workers, and they establish spaces of dialogue with the children. Teenagers don’t become violent one morning: they carry a long history of emotional pain, to which others have been deaf and blind.
There is much that we can do.
Starting with noticing to what we are protectively deaf and blind. If we were a small community, of, say, a dozen of homes – would we be equally deaf to the pain of a neighbor? Would we walk by oblivious of the difficult circumstances someone is going through? Urban living has a way to promote anonymity, isolation, with individuals ‘mending’ their own business. How does that contribute to the unseen sadness, the lack of love, the cultivation of pain that has to grow louder, until it catches the attention of the whole block, the school, the media? How large must be the pain, that paying with the own life or freedom becomes an acceptable price?
Each gunshot is a cry, a tear exploding in desperation. It creates pain and more tears, in an unending cycle of grief.
I am because you are.
When we start developing empathy and compassion not only for the grieving families, but for the lost lives on both sides, we may be closer to seeing and listening with the heart. That is when we really stop being part of the problem, and begin to be part of the solution.
Sustainability Advocate, EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability, February 28, 2018, Portland, Oregon.
About the Author
Isabel Rimanoczy
, Ed.D. has made it her life purpose to develop change accelerators. She developed the concept of the Sustainability Mindset by studying what inspired leaders to act in a business-as-unusual way. She created the UN PRME Working Group on Sustainability Mindset, a network of professors on five continents, is the Global Academic Ambassador of AIM2Flourish, the author of several books, among others BIG BANG BEING: Developing the Sustainability Mindset, and STOP TEACHING, and has published more than140 articles and book chapters.
Dr. Rimanoczy is a Fellow of the Schumacher Institute, UK, a Strategic Sustainability Adviser for One Planet Education Networks (OPEN) Senior Partner with Leadership in Motion and co-founder of the charitable organization Minervas: Women Changing the World. Isabel earned her doctorate at Columbia University, has her MBA from Universidad de Palermo and is a Licensed Psychologist from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She can be reached at isabelrimanoczy@gmail.com – www.isabelrimanoczy.net
Early in 2017 I came to the realization that the soul of sustainability lies within our interdependence or oneness or kinship. It was a
unlivable; and turning family life into a nightmare. The New York Times article, 1 Son, 4 Overdoses, 6 Hours, makes this point: “Drug deaths draw the most notice, but more addicted people live than die. For them and their families, life can be a relentless cycle of worry, hope and chaos.” 
connection and thinking of it as going to the soul of sustainability works. It works for not only knowing what to do next, but having the confidence to move forward despite inexperience or feelings of being overwhelmed or to hear yourself think, it’s not my problem.To start, here is a trailer of Called From Darkness by Paul Steinbronner as part of the Called from Darkness film project entitled A Home Boy’s Joy Ride. It features the voice of artist Fabian Debora and the work of Fr. Greg Boyle the founder of Home Boy Industries and author of Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.
“… the assumption that young people will somehow figure out a way to undo the deeds of their forebears, has crept into and spread like a cancer through UN climate scenarios.”
Lately I have been involved in a series of meetings with about thirty people and we represent all ages. It turns out I’m the oldest of the group and the people I’m most in need of hearing from our younger folks especially on sustainability issues, the most pressing being global warming, because I work from home and there are not many younger folks involved in local organizations including neighborhood associations, museums, and even churches. There are exceptions, of course, but what I see is mostly white hair and I live in a city with a reputation for being where young people come to retire.
After the last meeting I returned to my office and found in my inbox a newly added video to YouTube entitled, Young People’s Burden, a conversation between the renowned climate scientist Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and his granddaughter Sophie Kivlehan. I ask you to take 17 minutes to listen to Dr. Hansen and Sophie talk about how they both are plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed by Our Children’s Trust against the federal government in their efforts to secure “the legal right to a stable climate and a healthy atmosphere for all present and future generations” the very essence of the sustainability movement.
A second and related video is an interview (August 2016) with Julia Olson of The Children’s 
Trust. It is less than twenty minutes and like the Jim Hansen interview I urge you to share it with colleagues and especially your youthful friends and family members.
Finally, Dr. Hansen et. al. published a paper, Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions. Download PDF here.
Both of the above videos are in the EarthSayers.tv special collection, Climate Justice, which compliments our more general climate change and climate change risk special collections. EarthSayers.tv is a specialized search engine to all curated, video content addressing sustainability and advancing those speaking on behalf of Mother Earth and her children.
Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, October 28, 2016, Portland, Oregon.
The chief curator (me) at EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability, has created a new channel addressing Climate Justice. The impetus for doing so arose out of a study by the Yale 
Program for Climate Change Communication. They conduct scientific research on public climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, and the underlying psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence them. Of particular interest was their audience research, Global Warming’s Six Americas. A must read.
For climate change communicators I assume that this study formed the foundation for your present programs and campaigns. However, for those of us sustainability advocates with an environmental, social, and economic bent the Yale Program research may have been missed given the information overload that climatographer Mark Trexler addressed in his whitepaper, The Problem of Infinite Information in Corporate Climate Change Decision-Making.
Initially, these are the voices we are advancing on the topic of Climate Justice with more to come. Start with Linda Haydock of the Inter-community Peace & Justice Center’s What is Climate Justice? Continue on with Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former 
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on “Climate Change as a Human Rights Issue” and Julia Olson of Our Children’s Trust on “Securing the Legal Right to a Stable Climate.” If you parent or work with the more youthful among us, especially millennials, you might want to listen to the conversation between Dr. James Hansen and his grand daughter, Sophie Kivlehan on ” Young Peoples Burden.”
There are other voices to include Pope Francis, M.E. Tucker, David Korten, Anthony Leiserowitz, Tim Brennan and HH Dalai Lama.
“Most Americans say global warming is personally important to them, but don’t talk or hear about it much.” Yale Program Climate Note of September 29, 2016
I can’t do much about the talking part, but I can improve on the number of people, like you, hearing about it. It’s up to you to re-frame the conversation around climate change to climate justice and talk with your family, friends, and work colleagues.
“More than half of those who are interested in global warming or think the issue is important “rarely” or “never” talk about it with family and friends (57% and 54% respectively).”
Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, October 7, 2016, Portland, Oregon.
P.S. What sparked my interest was the Yale Program report, Faith, Morality, and the Environment: Portraits of Global Warming’s Six America’s which led to an EarthSayers’ initiative, Faith and Climate Justice. More on Faith and Climate Justice in my next blog post.
I was reminded of this 1946 photograph of Earth, the first photo from beyond the atmosphere when I curated one of the latest views of Earth, a NASA Goddard visualization entitled, One Year on Earth as Seen from 1 Million Miles, (2:46) noting how far we’ve come from that grainy black and white photograph taken nearly 70 years ago
to the breathtaking visualizations of today.
We are getting to know more about our Mother Earth from “out there” and 
hopefully it translates to a better understanding and love “in here” nothing short of a change in consciousness, a move from head to heart guided by the Laws of Nature.
There are many such visualizations on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel and I have curated those I found most interesting and added them to EarthSayers.tv, the Voices of Sustainability including this video, The ‘Voice’ of our Earth. (4 minutes)
“Our Universe Is Not Silent~Although space is a vacuum, this does not mean there is
no sound in space. Sound does exist as electromagnetic vibrations. The specially designed instruments on board the Voyager and other probes, picked up and recorded these vibrations, all within the range of human hearing (20-20,000 cycles per second).” – NASA Space Recordings Of Earth, Published on Aug 13, 2011.
The NASA Goddard visualizations also capture changes to our Earth that make it difficult if not impossible to ignore the effects of global warming to include this recent video, Earth’s Long-term Warming Trend, 1880-2015 (30 seconds) 
which shows temperature changes from 1880 to 2015 as a rolling five-year average. Orange colors represent temperatures that are warmer than the 1951-80 baseline average, and blues represent temperatures cooler than the baseline.
Many of these visualizations are enormously popular on YouTube such as the One Year on Earth video mentioned above with over 1.6M views. The number of views for videos addressing global warming suggest our citizens, unlike some 
elected officials, are active in the learning cycle. An example is another recent video, NASA Sees Temperatures Rise and Sea Ice Shrink -Climate Trends 2016 (47 seconds) published a week ago with over 68,000 views. This news story is what we should be talking about in all sustainability conversations – even informal talk about the weather one hears over cocktails and around the dinner table if we are to increase awareness and change behaviors.
“Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880.” – NASA Goddard
Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, July 29, 2016, Portland, Oregon.
Climate Change Risk expert Mark Trexler and his partner, environmental lawyer Laura Kosloff, launched The Climate Web in a large part because of the problem of “Infinite Information.” This problem, Mark says, is analogous to the adage “water water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” Given the rapidly changing nature of conversations around both climate science and climate policy, it’s a critical problem for business. As corporate decision-makers are deluged by information, it becomes harder to discern what data, news, opinions, and analyses really matter to making wiser, more prudent decisions.
It’s the same problem that drove us to found EarthSayers.tv, a specialized search engine to all curated, relevant voices of sustainability. It is very difficult to learn from and be inspired by our leaders when you can’t find them. There are now over one hundred and fifty YouTube channels relevant to sustainability, including those channels of our Indigenous Peoples, our wisdomkeepers with video content that is valuable but not necessarily findable.
There are a legion of search engine optimization (SEO) experts in the highly commercialized web. So, Mark, Laura, and myself are not the only ones addressing the infinite information problem. But we have distinguished ourselves by providing access to “actionable knowledge” on climate change and calling out the unfiltered voices of the sustainability leadership using technology coupled with curation in our two unique websites, The Climate Web and EarthSayers.tv . We invite you to visit and use them in your research, due diligence, and educational activities and programs.
Mark and Laura have some helpful resources for users to learn how to effectively use The Climate Web. For one thing, see this video, An Introduction to The Climate Web with Mark Trexler on the EarthSayers’ channel, Climate Change Risk. Secondly, I recommend you take a look at their recently published white paper, Infinite Information – A Key Barrier to Business Decision Making on Climate Change? — your complimentary copy is available for download here.
As publishers and curators Mark and Laura can help you use the Climate Web to your best advantage in developing executive briefings, supporting decision-making workshops, conducting topical trainings, engaging in climate risk scenario planning, and much more to include customized spotlights and decision dashboards.
Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, July 22, 2016, Portland, Oregon
Increasingly there is a greater number of our artists, musicians, and performers who are addressing climate justice or injustice as the case may be. As islanders experience flooding at the edges, those of us till dry and thinking there is still time and a Plan B might do well to listen to our poets and spoken word artists. Here are three such performers, two added this week to our climate change special collection on EarthSayers.tv. Give a listen in just three quick clicks and share the performances of these three dedicated and talented artists. Spread their stories.
Spoken word
artist Isabella Borgeson shares her poem on the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), one of the strongest storms to ever hit the Philippines (November 8, 2013). Four minute video published by Climate One on YouTube on May 14, 2016. Click here. (4:00)
This multimedia video produced by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board features Elijah Furquan, a spoken word artist in Milwaukee, WI, who describes the effects of extreme heat on his urban community.Uploaded to YouTube on Dec 22, 2010. (2:46) Click here.
Spoken word artist Terisa Siagatonu (Samoan) shares her poem on climate change and talks about the realities of climate change from her unique perspective as a spoken word artist/arts educator, community activist, and Project Director for PIER: the Pacific Islander Education and Retention project at UCLA, an access project that exists to combat the low matriculation rates of Pacific Islander students into higher education by offering services ranging from free tutoring, mentorship, and peer advising to Pacific Islander high school students in Los Angeles. Published on May 23, 2016 by Climate One. Click here. (6:00)
Published by Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, May 27th, 2016, Portland, Oregon.
This past month we have called out on EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability, two sustainability champions. These two indigenous leaders address sustainability, as a concept, in their presentations and are active in sharing their wisdom with us through online video. Their guidance has been invaluable to us.
Robin Kimmerer
Ilarion Merculieff
Today Earth Day, we introduce you to Ilarion (Larry) Merculieff (Aleut), Founder of the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways and Dr. Robin Kimmerer, SUNY distinguished teaching professor and Director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
We trust you will find in their words inspiration and a better understanding of why it is the elders from all four directions of Mother Earth are calling for a “change in consciousness, a move from head to heart guided by the Laws of Nature,” a weave of nature with humankind.
These are but two of their teachings – a place to start.
Going to the Heart of Sustainability, Ilarion (Larry) Merculieff, Kalliopeia Foundation, (1 hour, 26 minutes).
Restoration of Our Relationship to Land, Robin Kimmerer, Ph.D., Center for Humans and Nature, 34 minutes.
Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, April 22, 2016, Portland, Oregon.