Introducing The Clade. It has now been launched and you can read all about it and see the first contributions (and perhaps decide to join in and contribute yourself):
The Clade will bring together environmentally concerned writers, artists, photographers, videographers and podcasters who want to go beyond "environmentalism as usual." Environmentalism encompasses wilderness protection and human social justice, women's rights and artistic freedom, online organizing and solitary contemplation. We intend to reclaim environmental journalism from the Hearsts and Knight-Ridders of the world, to open-source the business of environmental reporting.
Who contributes to The Clade? You do. Sign up as a contributor: when we launch, you can share your observations, reporting, links to valuable websites, crossposts of your enviro entries on your personal blog, or other environmental information. You need not be an expert journalist, essayist or biologist. All you need is passion for the planet, a bit of familiarity with HTML, and the ability to construct a grammatically correct sentence.
A clade is a group of individuals and their common ancestor.
It's a useful concept in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology is all about degrees of kinship, and describing which groups share which common ancestors is the same as determining their degrees of kinship.
Think of it as a family. All life on this planet, past and present, is related. Sharks, mosses, yeast, lobsters, sponges and you: kin.
It's not one big happy family here on Earth, to be sure. One family member in particular has been getting out of line, claiming more and more of Earth's household for its own use. Even when we're confronted with the unsustainablity of our ways and decide to reform them, we ignore our other family members. We worry about fixing the climate because we want to stay comfortable, not because billions of our relatives will die, thousands of species going extinct. In terms of sheer numbers of threatened species, we have brought about what may be the worst extinction crisis the Earth has ever faced.
We humans like to think of ourselves as distinct from the rest of the living world, but we're all in this together.
If you want to know more, get in touch with us at The Clade. And please spread the word to anyone you think may be interested.
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