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Category: Make a Difference: Community & Calls to Action

Running. Kids. Earth Day 5K and Kid’s Fun Run for Clean Air

They may be smart, but most don’t understand the heart of nature.
They only invent things that, in the end, make people unhappy.

Yet they’re so proud of their inventions.
What’s worse, most people are, too.
They view them as if they were miracles. They worship them.

They don’t know it, but they’re losing nature.
They don’t see that they’re going to perish.

The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

-Akira Kurosawa, Yume

I love to get my run run on, most days.

I like it quite a bit better when my kids are with me, or when buoyed by the enthusiasm of a group run. We’ve done a couple of 5ks in Philly (the Color Run and Merrill Down & Dirty Mud Run), and it’s a great city for a race!

In a few weeks an event is taking place in Philly that I’m sad to miss, as it combines fun running as a community with support for clean air.

Fellow Philly blogger Sarah Mazzone is here to tell you all about it.

Celebrate Earth Day with the Family at the Kid’s Fun Run

Earth Day is the prefect time to teach our children about the importance of protecting our environment. As parents, our children serve as a great motivator to join the fight to ensure a clean air and healthy environment for generations to come. Taking our kids out to enjoy nature in a fun environment inspires awareness and action for protecting our natural resources. This Earth Day, consider participating in the 5K Run for Clean Air as a family and joining others in our community coming together to celebrate environmental health, clean air and sustainability.

The 5K Run for Clean Air, now in its 32nd year, is the largest Earth Day Festival in Philadelphia. Moms Clean Air Force, a non-profit over 120,000 concerned parents strong, is sponsoring a Kid’s Fun Run at the 5K on April 20th. This new event will include a 250 yard dash for kids under 5 and a half-mile fun run for ages 6-12. The event will take place on the steps of the Art Museum with a course following Martin Luther King Drive. Family entertainment will include eco-friendly activities like rain stick making and Frisbee spin art and programming and giveaways from Radio Disney’s Green Team.

Moms Clean Air Force is a nation-wide non profit organization committed to protecting our children’s health from toxic air pollution. The Southeastern PA chapter is actively working for strong mercury and carbon standards to protect our most vulnerable citizens, including children with asthma, pregnant women and babies. We are active in the community raising awareness and support, while also connecting with our elected representatives to remind them to keep children’s health a top priority in legislative decision making. If you are interested in getting involved with Moms Clean Air Force, be sure to sign-up for action alerts and for updates on local events.

I hope to see you and your family at the 5k Run and Kid’s Fun Run on Saturday, April 20th, 2013! On-line pre-registration is open until April 15th and you can save 15% off the registration fee by using the promotion code IRUN4KIDS.

Event Details:

5K Run for Clean Air, 3K Walk, and Kids’ Fun Run
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Register at www.5krunforcleanair.org
Race Day Registration Opens – 7:30 a.m.
Festivities Begin – 8:00 a.m.
Run and Walk Kick off – 9:00 a.m.
Kids’ Fun Run 9:45 – a.m.
Earth Day Celebration and Awards – 10:00 a.m.

Sarah Mazzone is the community field organizer for the Southeastern Pennsylvania chapter of Moms Clean Air Force. Moms Clean Air Force is a national non-profit committed to fighting for clean air to protect our children’s health. To get involved or stay updated on other local events, please sign-up to join the force today!

April 2, 2013
‘Don’t teach your children to love the wilderness?’ BULL PUCKEY.
BULL PUCKEY, I say.

I ran across this commentary on Jorgen Randers’ ‘2052: a global forecast for the next forty years,’ slated for publication in July, and was so flabbergasted by what I read in there that I’ve had the post open in my browser for days until I had time to write about it:

There is a section called “What Should You Do?” which is usually the part in such books that picks you up a bit, and makes you believe that you can do something…

[One] is “don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Randers reasons that over the next 50 years we will see the ongoing erosion of biodiversity and wilderness, due to climate change and humanity’s reach into more and more remote areas. A love for “old, undisturbed nature”, he argues, is something it will become increasingly difficult to satisfy. ”By teaching your child to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, you are teaching her to love what will be increasingly hard to find”, he argues, which will lead to unhappiness and despondency. ”Much better then”, he concludes, “to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity – and with never-ending music piped into their ears”.

What fresh hell is this?

(And no, I don’t mean the decidedly British punctuation issues.)

I know that it’s reported that the average American kid spends 4-7 minutes daily outdoors in unstructured play (just outdoors, not specifically in a “wild space”) and a hurts-my-heart-to-hear seven HOURS parked in front of a screen. It’s mind-blowing and seemingly insurmountable, but there are tons of initiatives trying to reverse that trend, from the National Wildlife Federation’s Green Hour to KaBOOM’s Playground Challenge to Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to Screen Free Week and so on.

Sure, we could just teach our kids to learn to just love their bodies, no matter how rotund and unhealthy they become, but we are not resigned. Right? We continue to fight that battle because we f*cking care about our children and their health and even if the tide is incredibly hard to turn, we have to try. If only to keep reminding everyone that we could be healthier, we can eat better and move more and spend more time outdoors, and we bloody well should.

We continue to teach our kids to value things that have value.

The idea of not teaching our kids to love and value the wilderness because one day it might not be there is like saying we shouldn’t teach our kids to love us— because one day we will be gone.

We also teach them how to live without us. We teach them in the hopes that they will carry us in their heart and their minds and in their words and their actions. And in the same way, it’s practical to teach them how to live in cities, how to navigate and find beauty there; but we should strive also to teach them to love wilderness and open space and green life, in the hopes that they will seek it and nurture it and preserve it. Because it has value.

Children will only try to preserve what they love, that’s human nature. And they will only learn to love wild spaces, solitude, freedom if we give them time to enjoy it; and by showing by example. Which is to say:

GET OUT THERE.

National Park attendance by young people is down. The more attendance declines, the more likely it is that these natural spaces will lose their government funding and protection. And once they’re gone… they’re gone.

But you don’t have to travel to a national park. There are plenty of pockets of untended nature all over the country, and they need protection. These are safe havens for wildlife, travel corridors. They are escapes for the human animal, a place to reconnect to the wildness and the peace within. A place for you to share with your kids. To create memories. To develop a stronger sense of self. To be healthier. To foster a love of nature.

For the record, there are some other things increasingly hard to find that I’ve also taught my kids to value:
- personal responsibility
- respect for their elders
- regular household chores that are actually useful (cooking, cleaning, laundry)
- proper grammar
- being well-read
- holding doors open for people behind them; running ahead to open doors for those who might have trouble
- manners in general
Because they have value. That’s reason enough.

What say you?
June 20, 2012
Picnic for the Planet

I really do believe that all of you are at the beginning of a wonderful journey.
As you start traveling down that road of life, remember this:

There are never enough comfort stops.
The places you’re going to are never on the map.
And once you get that map out, you won’t be able to re-fold it
no matter how smart you are.

So forget the map,
roll down the windows,
and whenever you can pull over and have a picnic with a pig.

-John Henson

April 22nd is Earth Day and on this day of ALL days there is no excuse not to GET OUTSIDE AND PLAY.

So pack yourself a picnic and GET OUT THERE 🙂

The Nature Conservancy is attempting to set a Guinness World Record for most people picnicking in 24 hours: from 8pm EST 4/21 through 8pm EST 4/22. Gather your peeps in the great outdoors and be a part of it!

Information about the record attempt (and having your picnic count) are right here.

Or go here to find a picnic already planned near you!

** Yes, that is a quite old photo of the kids. New picnic photos forthcoming. **

April 21, 2012