Mitakuye Oyasin
Honestly I would like to meet anyone.
Save Darfur
It is estimated that 400,000 people have died due to violence, starvation and disease. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes and over 200,000 have fled across the border to Chad. Many now live in camps lacking adequate food, shelter, sanitation, and health care.
The United States Congress and President George W. Bush recognized the situation in Darfur as "genocide." Darfur, "near Hell on Earth," has been declared the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.
Darfur is undergoing a cataclysmic humanitarian tragedy, yet the only time they covered it in the news the front page news was about steroid use in baseball and the Michael Jackson case.
The Sudanese government is guilty of genocidal crimes in Darfur. Their use of rape, illness, and starvation as weapons is utterly appalling. The United Nations said the death toll is at least 180,000, their World Food Program currently doesn't have the funds to make necessary deliveries of food, and the Janjaweed have setup rape camps for Darfurian women and children with full clearance of the Sudanese government.
As bad as all of this sounds, the worst crime of all may be the international community's inaction to quell the violence, and the deafening silence emanating from the media which we expect to inform the public about violence like this.
How many more Darfurians must be raped and murdered before it hits the front page?
Save the earth
Swapping 16 incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) saves emissions equivalent to taking a car off the road for a year.
Recycling saves energy: Creating a new aluminum can from scratch takes 95% more energy than making a can from recycled aluminum.
Making a ton of paper from recycled stock saves up to 17 trees and uses 50% less water than making paper from virgin fiber.
The U.S. uses nearly $1 million worth of energy every minute.
Air pollution from cars, factories and power plants is a major cause of asthma attacks. More than half of the U.S. population lives in areas with poor air conditions, and studies suggest that air pollution contributes to the development of asthma in previously healthy people.
The average American generates 4.5 pounds of trash every day, which is almost twice the amount of trash the average American produced daily in 1960.
Over the past 40 years, the total commercial and residential waste produced in the U.S. has nearly tripled.
Manufacturing just 17 new cars uses enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Power plants emit 40% of U.S. carbon dioxide pollution, the primary cause of global warming.
Only 10% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb produces light; the rest is given off as heat.
Half of the forests that originally covered 48% of the Earth's land surface are gone. Only 1/5th of the Earth's original forests remain pristine and undisturbed.
Since 1980, the earth has experienced 19 of its 20 hottest years on record, with 2005 and 1998 tied for the hottest and 2002 and 2003 coming in second and third.
The polar ice cap is now melting at the alarming rate of 9% per decade. Arctic ice thickness has almost halved since the 1960s.
Though Americans make up just 4% of the world's population, we produce 25% of the carbon dioxide pollution from fossil-fuel burning -- more than China, India and Japan combined, and by far the largest share of any country.
The removable roof rack on a car can reduce fuel economy by as much as 5%.
Almost 25% of the polluting matter in the air above Los Angeles comes from China's coal-fired power plants and factories, as well as fumes from China's cars and dust kicked up by droughts and deforestation around Asia.
55% of our trash goes to landfills, 14% is burned, and 31% is recycled.
About one-sixth of the wood delivered to a construction site is never used. Instead, it's hauled to the landfill as wood waste scraps.
Paper products are bleached to make them whiter and brighter. The chlorine used in many bleaching processes contributes to the formation of harmful chemicals that wind up in our air and water and are highly toxic to people .
Keep your head out of the refrigerator and the door closed! The refrigerator is the single biggest energy-consuming kitchen appliance, and opening the refrigerator door accounts for between $30 and $60 of a typical family's electricity bill each year. The amount of energy saved in a year by more efficient refrigerator usage could be enough to light every house in the United States for more than four and a half months straight.
Across the U.S., 12 million acres of lakes, estuaries and wetlands and 473,000 miles of streams, rivers and coasts are contaminated by mercury, which comes mainly from coal-fired power plants.
The National Recycling Coalition reports that recycling supports 1.1 million jobs in the U.S.
The millions of children around the world who have to deal with poverty, death, rape, starvation and so much more.