Earth Day Network Blog Updates

Happy Chinese Lantern Festival!  Today's festival officially ends the Lunar New Year with a New Year’s Gala which features a special hostess. Traditionally, the hostess wears an elaborate dress that includes seal skin and fur.

A whopping 2.4 billion people worldwide, primarily in the southern hemisphere, rely on biomass fuels such as wood charcoal and dung for heat and cooking. Women are overwhelmingly responsible for collecting and managing it, often contributing to deforestation and suffering ill health effects for their efforts.

Earth Day Network is excited to announce that we will be featured in this afternoon’s Good Jobs Green Jobs Conference workshop on Women’s Leadership in the Green Economy. This workshop will highlight our Women and the Green Economy (WAGE™) Campaign.

From February 8-10 in Washington, D.C., thousands of government, business and labor leaders will come together to share ideas and strategies for building a green economy that creates good jobs while supporting sustainability.

In case you haven't already heard, neither natural disasters nor a depressed international economy could thwart the dedication of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment (TCFHE), Earth Day Network (EDN) and 17 partner organizations around the world in achieving the goals of the Avatar Home Tree Initiative.

Earth Day 2010 was not only a day where hundreds of millions spoke out for their environment worldwide, but it also saw the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  What has been achieved since, in the cleanup and prevention of future disasters?

“Carta o plastica?” is Italian for the standard grocery checkout question, which may no longer be needed in Italy. The country has joined the global movement against disposable plastic bag use by imposing a ban on non-biodegradable, single-use plastic bags on January 1, 2011. These non-biodegradable bags may be cheap for grocery stores, but are extremely costly to the environment, building up trash on the streets, contributing to landfill waste, and polluting parks and oceans. Their production also requires petroleum and other vital natural resources.

A stellar group of international women leaders illustrated clearly the potential of women's contributions to finding solutions to the climate crises at two groundbreaking events in Cancun last week for our official launch of the Earth Day Network “Women and the Green Economy” (WAGE)™ Campaign.

Women are likely to be hit harder by climate change than men due to their social roles and the simple fact that they comprise as much as 70 percent of the world’s poor. At the same time, women are also taking the lead worldwide on developing solutions for a more sustainable, green economy, from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In the race towards solving climate change, renewable energy alternatives such as solar technology have been an important priority. With countries striving to create new, better and more efficient ways to lower the world carbon footprint, the United States has taken a giant leap forward. On October 25th, the Obama Administration announced the approval of what is said to be the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world. The plant will use a parabolic trough system so that energy radiated from the sun will collect into tubes.