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yuumei — Our Planet
#globalwarming #polarbear #climatechange #ourplanet
Published: 2019-06-18 21:00:06 +0000 UTC; Views: 30308; Favourites: 3569; Downloads: 184
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I recently watched BBC's Our Planet documentary and it showed both the beauty of our world and the destruction mankind has done to it. It's truly heart breaking but I hope we can come together and undo the damage to our home.I've been cutting down on my carbon food print by eating a mostly vegetarian diet, donating to reforestation efforts and policy change to protect the environment. Small efforts add up and we can all change the world for the better
Join us and learn how you can help at ourplanet.com
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Comments: 126
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wonderful art but the message is very sad, we really have to do something to clean up our planet
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Beautiful piece of art !
It motivates to do some too !
You're incredible ! :3
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Amazing!, I turned vegetarian a while ago too, I try and cut down on stuff whenever I can, also if you have any good suggestions for reforestation or general environment charities I'm all ears!.
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The thing is, the tablet (I'm assuming you use a tablet) you used to make this, has plastic in it tho, along with the pen too
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Have you watched Racing Extinction? It's depressing but good.
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From my notifications box, the bear merely looked wet and miserable.
Then I got a closer look.
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Ditto...Now, my heart is breaking...This is why I made sure my next car was a hybrid...
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love to see more of your artworks with good messages behind ;_;
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Very beautiful picture, very important message! I had watched this short documentary about plastic pollution about a week ago, and it's so sad when the narrator mentions that there isn't so much as a single beach untouched by plastic and litter nowadays...
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when i see this i imagine watching a nature documentary like 'life' or something of that regards. i imagine that the documentary starts normal normal but gradually while the narrator compliments the awesomeness of life and nature you start to see trash in the shots and slowly but surely they become ever more present in the documentary. the narrator never points it out because the documentary is about the beauty of nature but by the end of the documentary it becomes a eye sore that everyone watching notices and talks about but is never pointed out by the narrator.
but that's just what i'm imagining
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Doing what you can is great, but food production in general is a massive part of the problem. Agriculture is terrible for the environment and a plant based diet is marginally better than animal in the long run. When we get more wind/solar/nuclear power as well as lab grown meat and vertical farms, we will finally be getting somewhere.
It sucks because the problem isn't simple, on top of people feeling like they have no power which causes a spiraling affect of helplessness and apathy.
I think it would do us well to understand why we got here and why humans we as a species are very short sighted in our endeavors. We caused this, but we also often didn't know or didn't believe. This is why facts and information are so important and people really can't have opinions on matters that have real world consequences. The only way to combat that is education and try to get people to understand a few key things.
1.) We don't understand probability. All the time people have things like the Baader Meinhoff effect happen which creates a delusion that maybe our world is more conscious than we think, often leading to ideas in karma, like the world takes care of itself, but it'd doesn't. If we ruin this, we destroy our chances to not only move forward but live much longer as a species in the advances we've made.
2.) We don't understand long term reward for short term sacrifice. Our brains just aren't good at this kinda thing. People have a very difficult time waiting for things and with the system we have, major companies just don't get that a short term loss could mean a long term game. Some also can't take that risk, like smaller companies.
3.) People aren't evil. They are either stupid outright or ignorant. Most often people either don't know, or don't agree with your assessment. Engaging in us vs them mentality puts us right back where we started.
and
4.) We are not good at digging up the real info. Anytime you see any claim online or even a trusted friend, even if you already "know" do research. Find out what's actually going on by cross referencing information, looking up hopefully unbiased studies as much as you can. We agree with whatever fits our narrative and often what's easiest to digest. This can be either for apathy or drama (Everything is fine, or everyone is evil and doesn't care). Things could be better or worse than we think. And we get bogged down by our own biases. We need each other to call us on our bullshit when we spout it, because we're terrible at seeing where we're wrong. Being wrong less than 1000 years ago meant death, it meant exile from the tribe which we called home and depended on. We do not like being wrong, and we need to learn to accept that we're probably wrong about something at least once a day.
It's a multi-facted issue that stems from our shortcomings as recent cavemen living in a modern society. Our bodies are millions of years old, our brains are only a little younger and our society is thousands of years ahead of anything in our brains. We live very stretched in many directions and have trouble understanding why we are the way we are and more importantly, what can we do about it to help all living species on the planet that we call home? Do everything you can to help, but also realize that as a team, the human team, we need to do more as a group as well as individuals. And don't kill yourself over certain things. I see people often feel like they aren't doing enough and stress themselves out to hell and back. We need you, we need everyone to be in the best shape possible to make the best decisions, vote on things that matter, educate others. If you're just feeling guilty and freaking out about the problems around you, then you can't be of much help.
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For reforestation efforts, I've been donating money and using the Ecosia search engine.
www.ecosia.org/
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It really is sad. What’s worse, lots of adults who can really make a difference refuse to do a thing. By the time my generation is adults, it’ll probably be too late. But at least people are spreading the word! So thank you!!
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I understand now why you put the link redirecting from Facebook. For some reason dA keeps blocking the page and whenever I want to upload a journal including the link to the OurPlanet page, it says that thejournal contains blocked content. Like this.
Even while commenting, the link is considered as spam, no matter how broken it is.
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I've had the same problem with Medium.com. the support told me that they try to keep pages out of journals and such that have been misused for spam in the past.
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Interesting. I'm starting to lose respect for dA even faster.
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Thank you. This is my passion, and I wish nothing more but for humans to stop wrecking our home, and to stop killing the species inside it.
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You're right !
Il est vrai que notre planète regorge de magnifiques paysages et trésors mais c'est l'Humanité elle même qui la dégrade au point qu'elle soit menacée !
On doit prendre en compte l'impact négative sur la faune et la flore et changer les mentalités ( we can do it !)
ps : oui je suis francophone déso pour les anglo-saxons ^^'
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I really look up to you and your art! 
As an environmentalist, I'm always wondering whether we're doing the right thing, whether there is something bigger we can do, whether we've missed something most efficient all this time.
Lately, there are so many things where I'm starting to have doubts about whether we're really making a difference big enough to matter on the the great balance of things today.
Yes, we can cut down on our carbon food print by eating mostly vegetarian. Like eating eggs instead of chicken. But chicken will continue to be bred for their production, and the male chicken will still get separated and usually slaughtered as chicks (this doesn't only go to feeding humans, also to feeding pets like cats and dogs) because too many males aren't needed for egg production but merely for breeding more chicken. Very few roosters are kept as actual pets in comparison. We can consume milk instead of eating cattle, but this still leads to calves getting separated from their mother and not rarely slaughtered too (especially when male, and again to feed either humans or pets like dogs and cats). Unless they plan to raise it on fake milk and make another busy dairy cow where they separate the calf again.
But, not even being vegan is enough! Because rain forests and other wildlife parts are destroyed for a ridiculous OVERLOAD of soy production, where about half of which goes to feeding animals (both pets and live stock). Soy even gets mixed in food where it's not even needed for the animal because it's not their natural, native food source.
Then there is also the HUGE wildlife habitat destruction created for the production of palm oil, tea, coffee, sugar, chocolate, cotton, paper, charcoal, bananas, diamonds, aluminium, copper, and whatnot. Yes, we can buy from *responsible sources* but this doesn't make the already taken-over wildlife habitat come back.
For example, responsible sources for wood. They claim to plant at least as many trees as they cut down. But they still cut down trees and destroy the homes of animals (if not the animals themselves). And then they plant baby trees there, except that they take about a hundred years until they reach size of the previous trees- and fulfil their role as these older trees (protection of mud slides, storms, creating underground spring water from collected rain, etc).
I was working with foresters this spring for a little while, and we ended up killing frogs and other animals which were hiding under the leaves on the ground where we worked... and I think about this a lot. They died by us accidentally stepping on them, or they jumped into a blade while we did ground work. I wished we had never gone into that forest to do anything. I wished we had just left nature alone.
Fact remains, we humans continue to destroy wildlife habitats by literally anything we do to produce something, whether it's luxury, handy material, or food.
If we choose to eat something that doesn't directly grow in our house or in the direct neighborhood, we are also still responsible for the pollution from planes or trucks that transport the food to the market we buy it from. And the shit is usually wrapped in plastic for fresh-keeping too (remember bananas and other exotic fruits and vegetables usually come a long way and shouldn't rot during transport), so we financially support the production of plastic if we buy it too. Everything is just so wrong.
We environmentalists recycle lots of things, while big factories out there continue to spill literally galons of poison into the land and waters. Even my "clean country" Switzerland uses at least 40% electricity from nuclear power plants. Which means, as I'm typing this, I'm already using 40% of something that will create toxic garbage that won't be neutralized for roughly 1000 years. Literally tons and tons of garbage, piling up more and more until there's probably no space left underground where it gets hidden. Is me recyling things and cutting down on carbon really heavier than that other, literally toxic side of the scale? Our country is also one of many that claims to be clean- but only we export garbage to other countries. We are not really clean, we just move shit to another place and pretend it never existed. And remember, Switzerland is a tiny country on the world map. Big countries are even worse than us when it comes to garbage. Some don't even move shit to another country, but directly dump it into every fucking where. Even into their own drinking water.
People have been trying to warn us to slow the fuck down on this so-called progress that is economy 100 years ago already. And today the planet is being more destroyed by humans than ever. More pro-nature movies are made, yet things continue to get worse and worse every single day. Today is worse than yesterday, but better than it will be tomorrow.
Even though I continue doing what little me can do to help save nature, I strongly believe we're merely slowing down the progress of this complete destruction of our very life sources. We won't be able to stop it on the big picture. But I guess slowing it down is better than nothing. I want to enjoy the green, the animals, and clean drinking water as long as they're still there.
I have this vision that humans will kill each other into extinction (be it by destroying our water and food sources, or desperate wars for them afterwards), then nature will recover, and life will go on without us. This thought gives me comfort, that nature is immortal in its cycle. Natural history has shown that our planet has survived a lot of extreme things before the human species even existed (like being covered in lava or thick ice, or getting bombarded by rocks from space). Nature adapts after every serious damage. When trees where new millions of years ago, they didn't rot when they were dead. So nature started adapting and created fungi. The other day, I read news that microscopic animals started evolving that eat plastic. If that's true, then we have some neat, tiny garbagemen to clean up after us, after humans go extinct.
I'm sorry for rambling. If I can be proven wrong and our planet does end up being saved in time (outside the permanent damage like the already extinct plants, animals, melted glaciers, destroyed landscapes, etc), I will be more than happy to have been proven wrong!
Please prove me wrong, year 2080 or so. We won't have have much more time than that to survive as species, I believe. The difference of our planet's wellbeing between year 1990 and 2000 is already extremely shocking.
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I agree with everything you said. I study waste management and not producing waste at this point is pretty much impossible. There are, of course, ways to produce fully biodegadable plastic from renewable sources, but I doubt they will become popular before the end of our reign. Too many people cash in on poisoning the environment.
I honestly don't think we can reverse the process, we have fucked up way too much as a species. But the least we can do is try our best to slow it down.
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Thanks! It's good to hear something from someone who studied waste management, this gives a more valueable input on the topic.
There are compostable plastic bags, which I'm using for, well, compost. I have this small compost bin and put the compost bag in there, so I don't have to clean the bin whenever I empty the bin and throw the stuff on the compost pile. But these plastic bags cannot be used for wrapping things for protection because they do compost pretty fast, and aren't waterproof either. It's almost like toilet paper, haha. It falls apart when something is too wet or heavy.
I read some countries in Asia are starting to use banana leaves instead of plastic to wrap up raw food in grocery stores. But I'm also pretty sure these come wrapped in plastic when you order them, haha. Plus, more destruction of wildlife to produce lots and lots of banana leaves.
I don't know, it seems like we always have the choice between "BAD" and "WORSE", and it's honestly depressing.
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PLA, TPS and PHBV are all good alternatives for synthetic polymers. They come from renewable resources (plant waste or bacterial synthesis) and can be fairly durable, though not exactly as durable as petroleum-based materials. And they degrade quickly in compost, releasing nothing but water and CO2. What are the plastic bags you use made of, if I may ask?
And about the global warming, I honestly don't know anymore if we are really causing it, or if it's just a part of the Earth's climate pattern.
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I'm currently using the compostable bags from a brand called "alio" (made in Germany), which also say they use plant waste to create those, and it would decompose after 90 days max. But I couldn't figure out more, not even online. :0 And now I am suspicious of everything, haha.
This current global warming is proven to be man-made because of how quickly things are changing, and also the timing of when these changes started. Normally, something like a natural global warming (or freezing) is something that happens over many thousands if not millions of years. An age long enough to give life forms time to adapt and evolve. Remember the Ice Age wasn't over in 50 years, nor any other age in natural history. Every age in natural history was slow progress.
But ever since we humans started the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago, things started to change so dramatically, the animals and plants and other life forms didn't even have time to adapt and evolve anymore. And the industrial progress speeds up greatly every year! It has created a mass-extinction within just the lifetime of merely two or three human generations, and that's far too quickly. For example, the melting ice caps, which cause animals like polars bears to starve if they don't drown first. They can't hunt anything if they have no ice to stand on. And warm winters don't kill many of the beetles which will attack and kill entire forests the next summer. Lakes and rivers dry out and everything dies within them. Natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts happen more frequently and more powerfully than usually.
There has been no recorded story of this kind of natural disasters nor mass-extinction ever since the dinosaurs.
One of the books I own focuses on the consequences of global warming and how it influences the jobs of people world wide. Like foresters, fishers, wine-growers, farmers... all of them will say how much the world has changed since they were kids, and that it was never like that before industrial revolution.
There hasn't been a time where giant glaciers melted within just 160 years before, but here we are now:
www.researchgate.net/profile/M…
Remember this is was about the time when industrial revolution happened.
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Then I have even less hope that we can slow it down. :'D Too many domino pieces has fallen.
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Yes, sadly that's what many scientists predict too. We are way past the point of no return. We can slow it down, but not stop it anymore.
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Very good points you take up here. It really does feel like anything we do ruins the environment in one way or another and it is impossible to do something about. We are just too many people on earth and not everyone is going to behave. I am vegan since a year back and it is very hard to find food that has not been "poisoned", packaged in plastic, shipped over half the continent, or produced in slavery. Can I even drink water? I mean, we use big cleaning processes to get drinkable water which will then be pumped into our houses with the help of electricity (and almost no electricity comes without cost). If only I could eat grass from the garden...
As you say, we can't really do anything in the big picture, we can only slow down the progress of this destruction. Humans these days would not survive without all the things we have now, because we depend on it. We need electricity, we need food from the store, we need fuel for our cars so we can get to work etc. We can't get rid of it. I too believe that humans will sooner or later kill each other into extinction and nature will finally be able to recover.
I sometimes wish I was born as a bird instead, but then I realize that they probably suffer too. They too have to live in this polluted world. No creature lives an undisturbed life on earth.
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Thank you for your comment! And I appreciate that you're one of the smart vegans who still understand the big picture! c:
Because I used to get in fights with ignorant vegans online when I tried to tell them that plants are living beings already, haha. And other vegans claim to have zero garbage and zero animal-deaths with their diet, which isn't realisting either. For example, lots of small animals die by harvest machines when it goes through a field. It is a shame, we don't only kill what we eat (and it's correct to kill for a reasonable amount of food, whether it's a plant or animal), but we kill countless more lives by accident! I think for every life we take, we kill about a hundred more. Whether we're vegan or omnivore. Because our methods are way too greedy. Produce as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
Man, how much I wish were just a plain species that could survive on one thing for food. Bearded vultures eat only bones, and get all nutritions from it. Why are we designed to have to eat several things to get all vitamins, proteins, and so on? I wish we could just eat a handful of sand and feel full and happy for the next days, haha. How much would this change.
The other day, a plant expert friend of mine (who knows about 600 plants like a Wikipedia page, even with their Latin names and everything) told me that by creating fertile meadows/fields, we destroy plant diversity greatly. Ironically, there are more plants that can grow on the opposite version, the "rough pasture". Because the fertilizer works like steroids, some plants become so big and beefy, they push away other, "weaker" plants.
Now, there are many insects which specialize in only one plant species, just like there are plant species which have evolved to depend on an animal for pollination (usually insects, sometimes birds or fruit bats). For example, the caterpillars of a butterfly species eat only one plant species growing up. When they're butterflies, they're more flexible with food/nectar, but caterpillars only eat one thing.
My plant expert friend said, for each plant species gone, about 10 insect species die out with them (and I guess this also counts for the birds and bats that consume nectar of plants). And because we're creating more fertile meadows than natural rough pasture -because it serves us better to create food- we destroy about 2/3 of plant and insect diversity! It's pretty shocking to say the least. Media rarely talks about this, because I think wolves and dolphins are more popular or something. Nobody wants to save ugly insects and stupid herbs and flowers, right? :I
Luckily, there are farmers around here which get financial support so they can keep their rough pasture fields for nature protection. But I don't know how long this will last with human population growing and demanding more and more food from farmers. It's not realistic for a good future. One day they will have to turn that field into a human food source because there is no other place left to do so anymore.
Ahh, there are so many things we're doing that's destroying the planet. The list could fill one big, depressing book. And yet, it's rather impossible to go back with how things are. I mean, try to tell 8 BILLION people to change their lives, right now. Like, stop making babies for maybe 20 years, and adopt instead. Who's gonna listen? Maybe a few hundred if you're a talented speaker. While MILLIONS of new babies are being born every year, new humans which need food, a shelter, a job, all the stuff, for the next roughly 50 years each, average.
Earth, I know saying sorry doesn't even get anywhere near it. I don't think I could even ask for your forgiveness. We fucked up badly and deserve to suffer the consequences of our own actions eventually.
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Oh, I've had arguments with ignorant vegans as well x_x This trend "zero-waste" is becoming quite popular, but oh boy that's such a big lie! Nothing is completely zero-waste (better to call it low-waste or reduced-waste imo). And the thing with the amounts of insects and plants dying seems to be overlooked as if they weren't important. People care if a dog would die, but what about a mere insect? meh. This planet is simply fucked up.
Haha ikr xD Would be so good to just have to eat one single thing to be healthy. We are too complex for our own good.
Indeed people are too selfish and greedy to stop their busy life and actually try making a difference. Some have already given up and some choose to ignore. Some have decided to live off-the-grid in hope of returning to the old life (the difference now is that the lakes and forests are polluted so you will have a harder time finding and growing food).
Actually, if the human don't find their way to the grave, then I think a solar storm or some other natural disaster will take us out. Maybe it's natures way of getting rid of us parasites, like it gets an allergic shock from all the destruction we bring xD
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Definitely looking into more of this. Thanks for the share!
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I am going to do my part. I want to keep our home safe and the lives that live on it. Thank you for creating this picture and sharing it with us. It really opened my eyes.
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Thank you for spreading the message again and again with your beautiful paintings. It will be a lot of effort, but we can change.
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Good to know that i'm not the only one who finds this deep :<
Awesome job ^^
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