Global Issues Club

Here is what one of the posters made for the boot sale say so if you didn’t come to the meeting or want some information it’s here. This one was made by Nishat.

What: Boot Sale

When: May 3 2008. 3-5 PM

Where: Middle school parking lot

Why: The funds are going to A-CET for building the school.

How: Bring in old, unwanted and usable stuff to sell in the back of your car. Or donate some of it to ‘the table’.

Money: QR 70-For one space in the parking lot and QR 10 for entrance.

Who: Elementary kids; but the Global Issues Club is trying to help out!

Listen to the morning announcements and look for posters if you want to learn more.

- Leila 

I was just randomly checking out sites on Blackle and researched about sustainable energy. Then, I found this site and thought it was really interesting. This site is called Faiths United for Sustainable Energy… or just FUSE to make it more simple.
Here is a little intro to FUSE’s Missions and Visions:

Vision: Our vision is for faith communities to become catalysts in the movement to eliminate our society’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Mission: FUSE’s mission is to educate, mobilize and unite communities of faith to act on the increasingly harmful effects of our society’s dependence on fossil fuels.

To achieve our mission, FUSE consults with congregations to develop educational programming, congregation-wide conservation initiatives, and energy-saving facility-management practices.
FUSE raises awareness and catalyzes social and political action through an international network, based on the following universally-shared doctrines of faith communities worldwide:

• Respect of the Earth and all of creation
• Care for the health and well-being of the humanity
• Commitment to protecting and preserving human rights throughout the world

I think FUSE’s goals and achievements are very interesting. If you read one of their paragraphs, they tell you a little bit of what they’re doing in our society.

–Nabila

Going online and searching on Google to look for information is a common habit that everyone does. But little do people know that Google isn’t a very caring search engine…for the environment. A group of 5th graders told me that Google actually consumes different amounts of energy. In fact, they use alot of energy. This is because Google’s pages contains many colors. One of the most energy-consuming color is white. The background for Google is plainly white and therefore, the simplest colors play a huge part in the environment.

Blackle, a similar search engine, has pages that do not contain many colors. The site is mostly black with light or dark shades. According to researchers, the reason why the color black is much more better is because it is the most energy-sufficent color used in computers, TV’s and many other electronics. That is why your TV, cellphone or computer screens turn black when you turn it off. In one year, Blackle could save 750 megawatt-hours a year. That is the same as ten thousand 100 watt light bulbs burning for 1 hour! :O This search engine counts how many watts are saved everytime.
Blackle is still developing to be as superior as Google. It lacks other things Google has. For examples such as image search, video search and more. Although this is the weakest strength Blackle carries, the process of searching the web is no different than many other search engines.

This is a very simple habit to start; go to Blackle to search the web instead of Google. Finding pictures and videos aren’t found in Blackle though. This energy-sufficent website is surely more Earth-friendly than many other sites you would find. Changing your usual search engine for searching the internet isn’t much to ask. Try to make this a habit…

The Blackle Homepage

 -Nabila

We recently received the following letter from Michael Pelletier at the American International School of Riyadh. He asked that we share their work with you, our students:

Dear Teachers and Students from around the world;

Technology With A Cause is a club created by students at the American International School of Riyadh. Our goals are:

• To use technology as a catalyst for public awareness, discussion and appropriate action on social issues within our local, regional and global community.
• To Inspire and promote “Humane Education” amongst educators around the world through discussion and practical examples.

There is an important and global event taking place on March 29th, 2008

Watch Earth Hour here. AIS-R will be a part of this from 9:30 am to 10:30 am as a school community. We would like you to join us by promoting the event and having all of your students and teachers understand why this is important. Our weekends in Saudi are Thursday and Friday. Since EARTH HOUR is on a Saturday we will be participating at school. For most of you it will be a weekend so plan to do something at home.

We have created a Blog for all of you to join. Please post comments about how you will participate. Also, after the event we would like to see how much ENERGY everybody saved!!!!!!

Please join us by posting a comment cheering everybody on and getting involved. If you are not interested send it to a teacher or student who might be. Our hope is to have thousands of International School participants. So far we have 850 from AISR – HOW ABOUT YOU!!!!!!!!

End of Letter

So what do you think? Their goals seem pretty close to somethings we are working on. What can we do? Please send a comment of encouragement here and then let’s see what we can do. Perhaps we can have a candle lit dinner at school and raise funds for A-Cet. Or maybe you have other ideas. Get more info at the Earth Hour website. Start the conversation here now. Leave a comment below.

Natasha also said:

I noticed there’s not much on the environmental part of our blog so here’s a really good short video on global warming done by Leonardo Di Caprio

You can also go to Leonardo Di Caprio Eco Site for more information.

Hello all,

We have added a few sites to the Awareness links in the sidebar. I hope that we will have some time to view these sites togther and discuss what they are about, but in the meantime, why don’t you snoop around the sites, watch the short film and raise some questions here on the blog about what you see!

The first is about population growth and it is called 19.20.21

The other is called The Story of Stuff and is about Consumerism.

We look forward to hearing what you think…