www.energimeuniversity.org
~ Future Pioneers ~ Young Entrepreneurs ~ Experts ~ Inuencers ~
Nadine B Hack ~ Inuencer and Humanitarian
~ April 2020
Source: www.earthday.org
Welcome to EUC2 iNews! April 2020 Issue How’s everyone holding up? This is indeed a difficult time for everyone around the world. I’m hoping the stories in this issue will bring you a smile, a virtual hug and inspiration to share your own personal and community gardening stories with our global family. In our Future Pioneers’ section, Julie Brunson, from H.O.P.E. Gardens, delights us with a story about her daughter Makaylee. Then all the way from Pakistan, SaQi, a Young Entrepreneur and the founder of Community Kitchen Gardeners (CKG), takes us on a virtual visit to check out how his young nephews are tending to their kitchen garden. To date CKG has over 15,000 gardeners, sharing tips, seeds and the love of our worldwide community. Bill Sosinsky, our Expert from Energime University, has written an article about how the coronavirus (COVID-19) affects us now and in the future. AND….. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I am interviewing a worldwide Influencer and humanitarian Nadine B. Hack! Nadine was a member of the first group to celebrate Earth Day ~ on April 22nd, 1970! Before I close, a secret heads up ~ our September issue will focus on rescuing wasted food. A world renown Chef and a new, young author will be joining us to share their life affirming advocacies. First and foremost, please stay safe… and remember to email me to share what’s new in your corner of the globe. A Kindred Spirit,
Norma Burnson, Author & Publisher Contact: normaburnson.com Email: norma.burnson@gmail.com www.normaburnson.com
www.sustainable-food-for-the-globe.com
http://hopegardensgr.org/
Future Pioneers
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
Changing the climate in climate change By Julie Brunson “Hey mom! Mr. Beast accepted a meme challenge of planting 20 million trees by 2020 and he’s going to do it!” My 13 year old daughter exclaimed a�er watching a popular youtube video. I had never heard of Mr. Beast and thought it was some sort of fabricated story until Makaylee insisted Mr. Beast was a good person who was going to help with climate change. A�er doing my own research, I discovered that my daughter was right. Twenty-one year old YouTuber sensation Jimmy, “ Mr. Beast” Donaldson started the #teamtrees movement in collaboration with the Arbor Day Foundation and other YouTubers to plant 20 million trees by the end of 2019. "We only have one earth and it's important we take care of it. Recently not so great things are happening to forests and people just keep making fun of our generation for retweet activism and not doing something," Mr. Beast said in the video. https://teamtrees.org/
http://hopegardensgr.org
My daughter’s enthusiasm and positive outlook gives me hope as the effects of climate change are becoming a concern in our state and directly impacting the work we do in west Michigan. In agriculture, longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels are likely to increase the yields of some Midwest crops over the next few decades, according to the report though, those gains will be increasingly offset by the more frequent occurrence of heat waves, droughts and floods. In the long term, combined stresses associated with climate change are expected to decrease agricultural productivity in 1 the Midwest. https://news.umich.edu/climate-change-to-profoundly-affect-the-midwest-new-report-says/ At H.O.P.E (Helping Other People Eat) Gardens we have been addressing the challenges that climate change is bringing to the problem of food insecurity while teaching more than 2600 children and families the art of regenerative gardening. Our regenerative gardening method is an approach to growing by restoring soil through organic matter and biodiversity using a no till approach of covering the soil in a way which imitates how nature fertilizes and covers the forest floor every fall.
Jimmy Donaldson "Mr. Beast" 1.) Michigan New, University of Michigan
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
The result is a nutrient rich soil, teaming with biodiversity, that leads to an increase in crop yields and is better able to withstand the impact of climate change . The results of regenerative growing methods have been known to increase the amounts of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere. It has been argued that increasing soil carbon through regenerative gardening can help reverse climate change. In the spring of 2019, heavy rainfalls affected productivity not only in some of our gardens, but for local farmers. These climate challenges offered us the opportunity to engage students in conversations about how climate affects our ability to grow food. The conversations lead to observation. A stroll through a wooded lot gives us clues on finding solutions to the climate challenges. Look up! Look down! Pull back the soil and discover the web we call mycelium that holds the earth together while feeding the trees and living things that work naturally to filter and regenerate. As the child holds living soil in her hands while gazing at the leaves swaying in rhythm with the wind, she becomes aware that she can create her own little green world not knowing that she now becomes a climate change hero like Mr. Beast who exceeded the meme challenge with more than 21 million trees to date.
http://hopegardensgr.org
Future Pioneers in Action
For more information please visit H.O.P.E. Gardens website https://hopegardensgr.org/
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
Everyone having fun...
On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hopegardensgr/ You can contact Julie Brunson at hopegardensgr@gmail.com
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS Community Kitchen Gardeners Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/groups/communitykitchengardenrs/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_HMi8LhET-s0GTKLvrho6A?view_as=subscriber
SAQI Community Kitchen Gardeners
“Together we can keep Mother Earth vibrant and alive." Interview with SAQI by Norma Burnson Let me introduce you to SAQI (Suhail Ahmad Qureshi). SAQI is the visionary and mastermind behind the Community Kitchen Gardeners (CKG) located in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The Community Kitchen was established around 5 years ago, and currently has 18.3k active members from all over the globe. It is a place where our members share their experiences and educate each other about organic gardening. We believe that sharing is caring. By growing our own organic food, we show our love towards all our loved ones, especially our children. NB: From your perspective, how does climate change affect you and your community’s goal/work in food production? SAQI: Global climate change already has a number of observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have diminished, the ice in our rivers and lake is melting at a very fast pace, plant and animal habitats keep shi�ing, and trees are flowering sooner. Increased temperatures, the gradual shi�ing of weather patterns, the rise in sea levels, and more extreme weather events, are clear. There will be devastating and long term effects from these trending changes. The impact of climate change affects every country on every continent. It is creating unprecedented challenges for millions of people already burdened by poverty and oppression.
Community Kitchen Gardeners https://web.facebook.com/groups/communitykitchengardenrs/
So this is the right time to think about the eects of climate change. Everyone around the globe needs to make realistic plans for our own future and to save and keep "Mother Earth vibrant and alive".
Our communities are already facing shortages of clean water for drinking and growing food. This reduces crop growth and crop yield and eventually food shortage. Luckily our region has four growing seasons and vast expanses of agricultural land so we can grow a multiple number of crops. But this will happen only if we can educate our local community to become conscious and aware of how to grow food on a small scale. Whether it be in our own back yard, on our terrace or roo�op, it just depends on available space, our resources and time. Not only has collectively growing organic food proven to be the best way of uniting our community, it also empowers children to understand how seeds grow now and for many seasons to come. Our community gardening brings everyone together, especially families and their children.
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
Looking...
This is Abdur Rehman Qazi harvesting radishes...
Community Kitchen Gardeners https://web.facebook.com/groups/communitykitchengardenrs/
Eureka!
...and the best part is seeing Abdur's face full of excitement and joy! www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
NB: What steps are you currently taking to address and prepare for the future? Right now we are taking the following steps: • Teaching about organic gardening, which is the way to grow vegetables, fruits, flowers, or ornamental plants without chemicals • Educating everyone about the benefits of growing organic food that is pure, healthy and full of nutrients • Teaching seed choice, when to plant, and how to cultivate them • Educating about the best locations for successful growth • Instruction on soil preparation • Teaching about natural fertilizer choices: animal dung, leaves compost, kitchen waste compost, worm compost • How to protect plants naturally without pesticides • Importance of seed source, a big issue in the future, because OP seeds are organic as opposed to Hybrids, F1 or GMOs. Home grown gardens supply seeds for future seasons • Providing complete information on gardening from seeds to fruit, by using backyard lawn, terrace, roo�op, containers, or pots • Provide information about alternate crops and superfoods. Because we can’t depend only on basic crops, we prepare ourselves and our community to grow alternate crops due to changing future weather conditions • Working to make our planet cleaner and more eco-friendly.
Community Kitchen Gardeners https://web.facebook.com/groups/community
NB: What advice do you want the readers of your article to take away with them? We can live on this planet peacefully. We can survive only when we care about nature. In return, we reap the beneďŹ ts. "My mind is a garden. My thoughts are the seeds. My harvest will be either ower or weeds".
https://youtu.be/5SOnDf V4aDE
"Look what I did Uncle Sa Qi!"
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
CRITICAL LESSONS OF COVID-19 IN RELATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE CRISIS By William Sosinsky We are living in unprecedented times. In the space of a few short months, we have all suddenly become universally aware of the fundamental vulnerabilities of our modern society. This marvelous technical dream world we have planned for ourselves and the future reveals flaws. Much like the germs which derailed Martian plans for human conquest in HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds”, our population and the interconnected global economy have been brought down by a microscopic foe, against which we were powerless to defend ourselves. Yet with every great change comes the opportunity to learn and evolve. Perhaps we can take these lessons forward as we prepare for the challenges posed by climate change. Scientists and health experts warned us for years that a pandemic such as COVID-19 was inevitable. It was only a matter of time. Yet with all of that advanced knowledge, we were caught flat-footed and unprepared for the consequences of such an outbreak. So how does this lesson apply to climate change? Climate change is upon us and ramping up. The collapse of essential global resources, such as our food chain, is inevitable if we fail to recognize that threat and plan for those eventualities. If you are not prepared for this coming period in human history, in the words of P.T. Barnum, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Along with the threats of climate change, our decade's long spending orgy has placed the United States in an extremely impotent position. Just “writing a check” does not address these threats.
"Only if we all work together can we save our planet.”
William Sosinsky Source: Google
The modernization of the infrastructure and resilience projects needed to respond to these looming threats will require trillions of dollars if we are to prepare for the world in which we will soon all be living. Is there anyone out there who thinks we are ever going to be able to retire that debt with our current revenue model of tax collection supporting our budgetary needs? With the current “stimulus” package to address the COVID-19 issues, US national debt stands at approximately “23.7 trillion dollars and climbing*” ~ with no end in sight. So we in the United States are now facing the coming climate change with not nearly enough financial resources to prepare for it. We can see it coming but are still woefully unprepared. Under the conventional approaches our governmental leaders keep proposing, it would appear to be game-over for anyone with even a minimal education in economics. I would argue, however, that there is a way out of this mess. To get there will require a pivot to what we call “Sustainable Economic Development”. Sustainable Economic Development teaches our population how to grow an economy by concentrating on managing our resources for the future, and eliminating our negative impacts on the environment.
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
"Only if we all work together can we save our planet.”
William Sosinsky
Source: Google
The key to this effort is our Sustainable Planet Program. Our program is designed to teach students, through experiential education, how to strategically build a new economy maximizing conservation, efficiency, and the incorporation of state-of-the-art technologies, applications, and production protocols. Our program was specifically created to bring our global population to a critical and extensive depth of understanding of the interdependent complexities involved in the re-working of our global society. Without this knowledge, we will not have what is necessary to respond effectively. We welcome your interest and support as we develop this evolutionary world-changing education platform.
William Sosinsky
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
Nadine B. Hack, CEO beCause Global Consulting Senior Advisor, Global Citizens Circle 2010-2012 Executive in Residence IMD Business School via JC Brown, Executive PA Email: admin@beCause.net Skype beCause Global Website: www.beCause.net Lausanne, Switzerland
NADINE B. HACK ~ INFLUENCER
Celebrating Earth Day, Interview with Nadine B. Hack. ~ by Norma Burnson
NB: You’ve been involved with Earth Day since its inception. What motivated you back then? NBH: As a social justice activist in the 1960s, I began promoting the rights - social, political, economic - of all people in all places. I learned from my early mentors - Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug - that matters of racism, sexism and classism were inextricably inter-connected and that we had to address all to solve any. Rachel Carlson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, was a clarion call to me to embrace protecting our planet from environmental degradation as vital. In this constellation of issues for a more equitable world, that which we now call environmental justice, was then a growing awareness that those most affected by pollution were the marginalized. The first Earth Day, created by my colleague Dennis Hayes in 1970, was largely observed by students in colleges and universities. They were perceived by many in the mainstream as the “counter-culture,” carrying their copies of the Whole Earth Catalogue and a comparable “women’s lib” resource, Our Bodies Ourselves, published around the same time. By the mid-1970s, when I worked with Huey Johnson, CA Secretary of Resources and Governor Jerry Brown, we began to focus on renewable resources, a concept that hadn’t yet entered the common lexicon. We developed templates for global green
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
plans, coordinating with Wangari Maathai, founder of Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement. I am honored to have worked with such giants. What drew me to each was a shared sense of our fundamental connectedness to all of creation. I’d been profoundly moved by Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of “The Beloved Community” and felt a sacred obligation to help create it, a belief that still drives me today. NB: What transpired over the years, how have you acted on those beliefs, and why is that connected to Earth Day? NBH: In one of the most non-linear lives of anyone I know, my cohesive thread has always been my desire for and efforts towards creating relationships among disparate people and issues. In the 1970s I helped form the first of what would become many multi-sector partnerships that I’ve nurtured over the following decades. My TEDx (2013) presentation, Adversaries to Allies, describes that early effort to bring together environmentalists, business leaders and government officials, who were then bitter enemies and utterly distrustful of each other, to create a reforestation program that remains intact today. Fostering meaningful relationships transformed animosity into cooperation. I’ve always believed that only together can we address the world’s problems, which are too great for any one sector to solve on its own. Since the 1980s I’ve been a senior advisor to the Global Citizens Circle which has fostered diversity, inclusion and civil discourse to create constructive change, engaging hundreds of thousands internationally. Since the 1990s my company beCause Global Consulting has had connectedness as its central mission.
beCause.net
We aid individuals and organizations to connect to their core purpose, connect across silos within their organizations, and connect with external stakeholders, even those that might initially be antagonistic. In the 2000s, I became the first Executive-in-Residence at IMD Business School to focus on responsible leadership (i.e.: sustainability; corporate social responsibility; human, social and political rights; diversity and inclusion; etc.). I urge businesses to change their “walk” not just their “talk” (i.e.: “greenwash” with a noble mission statement). I see direct applicability of all this to what I hope for on Earth Day 2020. I believe our success turns on genuinely recognizing our crucial interconnectedness and helping stakeholders from every sector appreciate this as a truism. Will we take to heart that “we're all in the same boat, and we will sink or sail together?” We must motivate nations, companies and individuals to do the very hard work to act upon this deceptively simple seeming reality. NB: What is your objective for now, Earth Day 2020? NBH: My firm belief is that finding solutions for our big dilemmas must transcend boundaries - national, religious, sectoral, generational and other. This is now clear and center as our entire world grapples with COVID-19. Just as the virus connects us so does our global environment. It’s why I applaud “intersectionality” in organizing. Everywhere in the world has an impact on everyone else in the world. This has always been true and we simply can’t ignore it anymore. At the IMD’s global alumni event I gave a speech on “Leadership, Responsibility, Action and Hope”. It remains to be seen how seriously, (how responsibly) corporations will take the Business Roundtables redefinition of the Purpose of a Corporation, which advocates moving away from exclusive shareholder primacy to a global spectrum of stakeholders.
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu in Soweto I’m monitoring corporations around the world to see if they step up to the plate. Are they working with governments, NGOs and citizens in a concerted effort to stop the growth of the Covid-19 pandemic? This may set the stage to see how good they can be as stewards of planetary health. Will businesses heed the call of former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and his newly formed IMAGINE that urges them to have a “collective sense of urgency to move at scale and speed to stem runaway climate change?” And will nations truly follow through on their national commitments to the 2015 climate change Paris Agreement? Per the website earthday.org , it must be an "historic moment when citizens of the world rise up in a united call for the creativity, innovation, ambition, and bravery that we need to meet our climate crisis.” Will we heed this and the call for an immediate response coming from a global youth movement inspired by the acts of teenagers like Greta Thunberg?
beCause.net
Will we, as citizens of all ages, fulfill our responsibility? As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” I have been at this for decades, and I will keep being a committed global citizen. I will continue to do everything in my power to inspire others to be global citizens. All people of the world and our shared planet need us now more than ever. There is no “planet B”.
First St. Patrick’s Day at Obama White House with husband Jerry Dunfey
www.energimeuniversity.org ~ April 2020
Professor Elizabeth Greenwell August 12, 1945 ~ March 29, 2020
"Can we, all of us together, water the ďŹ elds of humanity, and bring about a harvest so great, that it will take the world to pick the fruit, a harvest that is civil society? I think we can." Watering the Fields of Humanity ~ Professor Elizabeth Greenwell
Liz's love for humanity and the Earth will stay alive through all the people she inspired. You can visit the Worldwide Condolences tribute at https://bit.ly/2wpt2TW.
EUC2 PRESS Norma Burnson, Publisher Blog: normaburnson.com Books: www.amazon.com/author/normaburnson Email: Norma.burnson@gmail.com Website: www.sustainable-food-for-the-globe.com Kevin Burnson, Editor Email: kevin.burnson@yahoo.com Website: www.sustainable-food-for-the-globe.com Dr. Julia Scalise, Publishing & Communications Consultant Book: amzn.to/2qP0Q76 Email: jscalisednphd@aol.com Website: www.JuliaScalise.com FUTURE PIONEERS Julie Brunson, Executive Director H.O.P.E. Gardens Email: hopegardensgr@gmail.com Website: hopegardensgr.org YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS SA QI, Founder & General Manager Community Kitchen Gardeners Email: saqi786sa@hotmail.com Website: https://web.facebook.com/groups/communitykitchengardenrs/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_HMi8LhET-s0GTKLvrho6A?view_as=subscriber EXPERTS William Sosinsky, Founder & Executive Director Energime University Email: bill@energime.com Website: www.energimeuniversity.org INFLUENCER Nadine B. Hack, CEO beCause Global Consulting Senior Advisor, Global Citizens Circle 2010-2012 Executive in Residence IMD Business School via JC Brown, Executive PA Email: admin@beCause.net Skype beCause Global Website: www.beCause.net Lausanne, Switzerland
www.sustainable-food-for-the-Globe.com