This fabulous Mothers Day idea was posted by a enviro writer and friend Suzanne Elston at her gorgeous blog Your Earth.

“On a buffety, blustery early summer day, when the news was bad and the sky turned yellow, a strange thing happened in the town where I live.”

Two grandmothers take a stand in a local park with the single goal of saving the world. They don’t speak, they don’t act, they merely stand silently all day until people begin to ask what they are doing. While some laugh, other begin standing with them, until across the country thousands upon thousands of women – grandmothers, mothers and daughters, stand together. United and silent.
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I’ve added a travel page to the header cleverly called “Where’s Stephen”. The idea is that everyone can see my upcoming travel plans — nearly always to cover stories — and will offer suggestions, ideas, contacts to look into for potential stories while I am where ever. This is my way of trying to “offset” the environmental impacts of my travel.

A shiny, giant 4X4 SUV rolls by, jacked up a half-metre off the ground to leap manhole covers with its 500 horses snorting toxic gases. Anger becomes sadness then slips into despair and slowly shifts to pity:

Folks place such personal value and investing so much of themselves into hunks of unfeeling metal.

And they miss the pleasure of walking on a beautiful spring day — too busy to pause and enjoy — too busy to play because they must pay and pay again for their shiny bauble.

Pity.

Humans are the ultimate apex predator — we eat anything that moves and hardly anything wants to eat us.

Sharks got nothing on us.

So what does it mean in ecological terms when there are six billion+ apex predators roaming the planet?

Massive extinctions of other species for one thing as we munch our way down the food chain. As species decline, ecosystems unravel leading to more declines and maybe some blooms of things like weeds and jellyfish. And eventually (perhaps sooner than later) we run out of food and lose ecosystem services, both of which will contribute greatly to rapid increases in disease and death in humans.

That seems to be the logical and grim ecological prognosis.

However, like a car hurtling towards the edge of the cliff, we’re arguing about what CD to listen too instead of applying the brakes. [Or more likely, each of us is plugged into our own IPOD and oblivious to each other and anything else.]

I admit that writing about environmental issues can be depressing. I’m actually an optimist and believe we will jump on those brakes at the last minute.

What would you do?

A commercial trade magazine ($32/yr) took one of my stories, acknowledged me as the original author, rewrote portions but added no new material and put it in their magazine and on their website. I did several interviews with experts who were hard to find and wrote a pretty good story on a new discovery that would benefit farmers. I own the copyright to the story and they didn’t ask and they didn’t pay me to use it.

It is tempting to either use someone else’s writing or make some cosmetic revisions and feel free to profit from it. But its wrong, illegal and adds nothing. Better by far to express your thoughts and research — even if poorly written.

Any ways I asked this publication (which may or may not make this theft a habit) to take the story off their site and compensate me for the use of my material.

So far I’ve been ignored.

What would you do?

Chuse.

My Peak Fish story is referenced on a relatively new ecology and science blog carnival called “Oekologie“.

What’ a Blog Carnival?

Here’s what I found out. People collect the best blog posts on a given topic, and then someone puts all those posts together in a blog post called a “carnival”. With “Oekologie” a different site hosts the once a month carnival.

It’s a very smart idea and makes for great reading. (And certainly not because my one of stories is posted)