NAAEE Crowd Inspiring and Supportive Community

This week, I have had the pleasure to spend time with some of the most innovative and determined individuals, who are responsible for the future of our Earth. They are the educators who work tirelessly to provide knowledge and instill responsibility in our future generations. I'm attending the North American Association for Environmental Education 41st Annual Conference, Gaining Perspective: Seeing EE Through Different Lenses.

My presentations to this group have been focused on music in education. This is where Earth Mama began, working in my son's classrooms, with his peers and his teachers, advocating an understanding of our human impact on the Planet Earth. This week I've met many teachers who are continuing that work, creating programs and curriculum in diverse environments, covering a multitude of issues, facing the challenges of budget cuts, apathy and outright opposition to the realities of climate change.

For all those teachers who are working to connect with young minds and raise awareness in those communities, here are some tools that use today's media of choice, video.

YouTube Teachers is a collection of videos and tools created just for teachers by the developers at YouTube along with a global network of contributors. There are over 700,000 videos collected on a wide variety of topics, along with instructional videos on how to create a YouTube channel of your own.

And that brings me back to music, which has been my teaching tool of choice. I'm involved in the efforts of Musicians United to Sustain the Environment (M.U.S.E.) to create and continually expand a database of environmental music. This is a daunting project and we need volunteers for all aspects of this effort! Recently, Stan Slaughter covered our efforts in a Mother Earth News article, detailing how the collection of eco-audio is available 24/7 on EarthDayFM, an online radio station. Encouraging today's youth to learn through music, listening to the songs telling stories of history and science, sharing life experience in a memorable context, this is how I use music as an education tool.

As I return home to the mountains of Virginia after this week in California, it is my intention to share what I've experienced here with this energized group of educators. Thank you, for your ideas, your determination, your creativity and your enthusiasm to honor our Planet Earth.

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Joyce Rouse AKA Earth Mama creates blog posts on timely topics in collaboration with her communications manager, Bonnie Cranmer. Please refer any questions or requests for permission to use any material contained on this blog to earthmamaoffice@gmail.com.

Buy Local Music, Song of Community!

Another way to Buy Local...

Ten to twenty thousand dollars to produce, record, and manufacture a CD.  Yup, your favorite local band or singer-songwriter finds a way to scrape together the money for studio time or very expensive equipment, hire a graphic designer, and order a thousand units, just so their fans can buy a CD, to play in the car, at a party, on their computer.

Buy their CD, you get the songs, liner notes and musician credits, artwork, the songs playing in an order designed to build for your enjoyment. All this for $15!

The musician gets to use the proceeds from the sale to pay for the project and to keep making music for you. Or you can buy a song by download on iTunes or Amazon and the artist will get paid anywhere between 4¢ and 65¢.  Hear it via a streaming service and musicians get paid  .000007.  Burn a copy of the music for yourself or a friend and you break a musician’s heart.  Creators of music have come to refer to services such as Spotify or Pandora as “digital parasites”  because the service makes millions, artists and musicians now make —this is
 really the term on our statements—micro-pennies.

So, if you want to hear music in your community, and support local economies, please support your local musicians.  If you like their songs, please buy the CD.  If they are using social media, connect and share them in your network. If they are connected to a rising indie label, check out the other artists on the label. The photo in this post is my dear friend, Jim Stoltz, or Walkin' Jim as he is often called. He walked thousands of miles across the United States, performing and supporting environmental activism in communities where people came together to raise money AND for music!

We all have these generous souls in our communities.These are the same musicians and bands that show up and donate their time and talent (and equipment and gas) for every good cause and fund raiser in the community.  Please show them a little love and appreciation and buy their CD.  For yourself, or for a friend.

Music, the universal language. Support it locally. Thank you.